that study is problematic because while they look at the cradle to gate cost of the electric drivertrain including battery, comparing to the ICE car drivetrain, they don't look at all the cost of Petrol + all the unaccounted for externalities that go into it's extraction and delivery. A good comparison would include the cost of electricity extraction both for the ICE car and the electric and then do the comparison. As it stands, this study tells us that Electric cars are more 'expensive' than ICE cars.
When you say they "left out the petrol", are you assuming that a better analysis would assume that the petrol is never made in the first place?
I mean, that might be the wish but we don't yet live in a world where the gas will stay in the ground if we don't use it to fuel one automobile at the margin.
Child has it. The way this study is written, we're asked to compare more or less the carbon impact of an empty gas tank and the battery pack. That seems a bit unrealistic to me. yes the drivetrain is different and therefore more costly, but when it comes down to it, looking at the examples in the paper, the comparison is between the battery pack and an empty gas tank. That seems disingenuous to the broader point of carbon emissions for the entire life-cycle of the vehicles, which presumably would include use.
Which approach is "more realistic" depends on whether you are evaluating the decision between an electric car and a gas car at the margin, or not.
If it's you as a consumer buying the next car to be produced, then it is entirely appropriate to compare it that way, because your single purchase will not change the entire life cycle.
I think their point was that it seems unfair to count up all the of the embodied energy of an electric car's batteries, but to only count the potential energy of the ICE car's fuel.
This is true, but centralized power generation is a lot more efficient then creating the power individually at the point of consumption like ICE cars do today. I believe that an ICE motor is something like 30% fuel efficient, Electric something like 80-90% and a combined cycle blah blah gas turbine is more like 60-70%. So no, it won't be the full 14% but it won't be a few points either, probably safe to say 5-10% reduction.
A very good heuristic is to compare their total $ costs for purchase and use, and then think about what sorts of externalities that doesn't cover. I've found over and over again that $ cost pretty much equals energy and therefore pollution cost, less the externalities. But the externalities are really super important, and of course, engine efficiencies and where in the cycle the energy is liberated from it's chemical bonds is important.
This is a follow-up from their announcement a year or so ago that the two would combine forces to create an open sourced framework/playground for AI learning. This announcement is simply that promise made publicly manifest.
This seems like such a small thing right now. Looking forward to the interconnectedness of people and machines, this is going to be a watershed event for a lot of people. Cochlear implants are in 10s of thousands of people today, and being able to directly connect them and other hearing aids to mobile supercomputers is a huge huge step. I cannot even imagine what new interaction modalities emerge as a result of this.
Microsoft are using Intel/Altera FPGAs in the datacenter, and not likely for mass produced devices like this.
While it is possible they are using FPGAs for the Hololens Processing Unit, I seriously doubt it. The FPGA needed to exceed the performance of a high-end mobile GPU (OpenCL/CUDA for Deep Learning/AI) would have an excessive power consumption for a mobile device.
Another factor is that higher end FPGAs are expensive ($200+ wholesale) and typically cost thousands each, and not suited to a mass produced consumer device.
As for who made this HPU, I'd say AMD helped design it and GlobalFoundries (or maybe TSMC) are doing the production.
I have a friend at Intel who works in the AR division and their comment to me is that in one way or another all AR/MR glasses are running Intel silicon. I asked them specifically, does that include, Hololens, Apple's Project, and a couple others specifically, and they answered in the affirmative. YMMV though.
My dad was not a successful founder. He quit his job at 40 or so to start a company. He failed miserably, and despite us being fairly well off, went into a downward spiral. He is divorced, alone, and living in a trailer park. Every time I visit him in his doublewide in Campbell, still same furniture as person who died in it had, I expect him to be hanging from the rafters. He was a serial startup employee with over 20 years tech startup experience before starting. His startup destroyed his life. the YC, anyone can become a founder mythology is toxic. My dad was rich from previous exits, had everything going for him, and had a good idea/execution. He just couldn't boil the ocean and it destroyed him.
Something similar happened to my dad. He had a pretty successful company providing security guard services mostly on government contracts. It wasn't very lucrative. He wasn't rich. But, it paid the mortgage and the bills and my siblings and I were well taken care of. Then, when I was around 9 or 10 or so, Wackenhut kind of raised a lot of money and became the Amazon of security guard services. They Amazon'd his company and everything he built just kind of slowly disappeared over the next couple years. He could have done OK getting a job as a security guard himself and working his way up or even changing careers (he was reasonably intelligent). But, something about his company failing broke him and he just kind of never did anything after that. My teen years were absolute chaos until I dropped out of high school and got a job driving a fork lift around 17 and moved out. I remember there being absolutely no food in the house for days and days. It was crazy.
I've had a bunch of friends/acquaintances that killed themselves (hung/shot/jumped off the GG) after their start-ups failed. But, they all did it during the first boom (90's). I haven't personally known anyone that's done it during this boom, yet. I think the difference might be that the bubble hasn't popped yet this time. People who fail can still easily go find work. Back then all the companies were laying people off. So, if your start-up failed there was basically no where to go but back home. Probably the majority of the people I knew in SFBA back when the bubble popped did that. It was crazy how suddenly highways that were packed with traffic could just be cruised down at the speed limit during rush hour with out touching your breaks until you got to your exit. It seemed surreal.
10% -> 2025; 20% -> 2030; 50% -> 2040; 95% -> 2050.
India/Africa are included there. I think 95% of potential GHG emmissions (not just indexed to today but to 'present time') will be crossed in like 2060 or so. Renewables are going extremely quickly. we are in the steep part of the s-curve and there is no reason to believe we wont' get a few doublings due to battery cost decreases and deployed solar cost efficiencies. The transition will be a lot faster than ppl believe.
By that plan, we'd be looking at ~21.6 years of current GHG emissions.
This will add ~777 GT of CO2 to the atmosphere. Which will put us at ~500 ppm CO2 (We just passed 400 ppm). That would be warming between 2.5C and 3C.
If you want to hit a 95% reduction in GHG emissions, you're also going to have to:
* Shut down every single fossil fuel power plant over the next 25 years.
* Build enough renewable/nuclear powerplants to replace all of our fossil fuel power sources, twice over. (Assuming we switch to electrical transportation.)
And, the elephant in the room:
* Halve all current trans-continental shipping and air travel. It is currently responsible for ~6-7% of our GHG emissions. (And if it were to grow unconstrained, would likely double in volume in the next 30 years.)
* While bringing our other emissions down to nearly zero.
We can clearly do all this, but it would require significant changes in our lifestyles - something that optimists tend to not be willing to accept.
Agreed. It is more dire than most scientists are willing to admit or the public are willing to hear. At this point I think the best hope is:
a) incredibly rapid adoption of renewables
b) a Manhattan project to find a way to pull carbon out of the atmosphere starting within ~1-3 decades, once it becomes beyond obvious we've already emitted far too much and the consequences of inaction are more than human civilization can bear
This is the craziest thing I've written in 2017 but: I sincerely believe we will have consumer fusion reactors by 2030 if not sooner. The work of MIT SPARC combined with graphene manufacture will make this a reality. Combine this with all the investment in battery load leveling and electric vehicles and you'll see a very rapid energy cost reduction and deployment. Probably 10 years once the design is functioning. As to the boats, these reactors are well sized for boats. My guess is ICE Air-travel will be completely eliminated for mass consumption by 2070 if not 2050, replaced by faster cheaper evacuated trains and electric short-range aircraft. The power density of li-ion batteries at roughly 350WHr/liter is not great, I'd wager we can easily get to 700WHr/liter with graphene supercapacitors utilizing a combination of 3D layering and fractal interaction. I've seen an experimental graphene supercap with fractal interaction at 1200Whr/Liter but it had a tendency to explode with only a few cycles. The normal graphene supercaps go like 100k cycles with no degradation, or 30 times longer than lithium ion cobalt (what tesla uses). We are so freaking close to cheap graphene it's ridiculous. That's the technology no one sees coming, it's just about to enter the productivity plateau. /end crazy person talk.
Textbooks? Seriously though I think there is a movement among the rich in America/world to buy products that are simple to use, high quality, and durable. The problem in my view is not that these products don't exist but that it's very hard to find them and verify quality in production over time.
I am not impressed by the "expensive" products, as an example I own a Nexus 7 tablet, touch input stopped working reliably, I searched and found many similar issue, the solution is to open it and plug back a connector that got lose and maybe add some paper to have the thing pressed on it's place, so this is not a cheap, no name product, the problem could have been avoided maybe with a few more cents investment per product.
I have similar experience with brand name keyboard and mioce that were not cheap and did not perform.
for the most part, I don't consider commodity equipment to be 'expensive' even if the price point is expensive. I've observed that there are usually two classes of products in any market, the commodity bottom 80% and then the premium top 20%. My comment is about products that inhabit this 20%. To date, and from my point of view, there is no product running android which falls in this premium category. With the Nexus 7 tablet specifically, I see a commodity android tablet with slightly better build quality and some more expensive components. Not a premium product like the iPad Pro.
But most of the premium of iPad is branding, the extra money you pay is not in the hardware, and Apple products also break so you pay a ton of money(you would need to be rich or really a big fanboy to justify buying an Apple product in countries with a lower economy like Romania where you also have taxes and pay a lot more then someone in USA would pay). My point is you buy a super expensive Apple product but you don't get 5 years warranty even if you spent 2-4 medium incomes on it.
We should not be employing people in jobs that can be automated. We should try and automate everything. We should develop technologies, processes, and abilities so that everyone can learn new things. The people that want to learn will be incredibly leveraged and provide a ton of value to society. Those who don't want to learn should be given enough for basic subsistence. A stipend which covers food, shelter, clothing, catastrophic healthcare, reasonable water access, and unlimited data. I would also push that all humans can be close to nature in some way, be it a park or otherwise. We have the technology to do this. Instead we have protectionism and fear.
I agree with this for the most part. There is a real human need though, and not one that makes a lot of rational sense, but a need nonetheless, to be needed. And for a lot of people in that world you described it wouldn't be met. It's kind of perverse right, because people don't want you to artificially create need for them (it wouldn't be fun to receive your basic income in compensation for digging and then filling in a big hole), they want it to be a genuine need for their talents. And unfortunately although we evolved that yearning to be helpful, we also evolved the ability to automate away most of the tasks that would have stimulated that.
There is a ton of important work that needs to be done that gets the short shrift in our society. Taking care of our elderly and our children, teaching, cleaning up and looking after the environment, community service. There is a massive gap between the activities that our economy incentivizes and what is good for the health and happiness of our communities. Basic income doesn't have to involve useless hole digging, there is plenty of work out there that would be both useful and rewarding.
Well, using science we could construct a study where a large scale community has many services pro died by humans vs another large community where many services are provided by automatons. We could look at the strengths and weaknesses of both and maximize human happiness and well-being.
The result could be as simple as machines just fill in gaps for when were tired, moody or on vacation. We could optimize for min usage of automatons, and target low performers for educational opportunities and psychological support.
I much rather have window cleaning and fixing road pavement automated than looking after my kids and the elderly. I doubt that the machine or robot will be able to convey the empathy required for people interaction.
The robot is not going to molest my kids and the elderly. The Robot will not cough tuberculosis spores onto them, will not touch their food after picking a nose or wiping an ass (both of which the robot lacks), and will not brush them with herpes sores. When the robot dies, an exact replacement can be had. The robot will never decide to kill out of frustration, religious fervor, or revenge. The robot will not steal.
But those are jobs where personal contact matters, and that's not easily automated. By all means automate the hard/annoying/disgusting parts that can be automated, but still add people for the personal touch.
Today, due to the low amount of money we're willing to spend on care, and the high demands and pressure on the people providing that care, people who care for elderly and sick people often don't have the time for personal contact, often to their own frustration. So let's automate everything else so people have more time for real contact.
I think you're dramatically underestimating the cost of providing personal care. It's incredibly expensive because it's so labour intensive, and as you point out it's the personal part of that which matters, which makes the costs so hard to reduce.
I think iain bank's "the culture" novels explore this future in depth quite well. I will not spoil it but the basic idea is "games" - people will just be able to play all the games they want and compete with one anoher without the need to survive.
Also, there is absolutely no abuse of power in Banks' society. This would certainly be a problem in a fully-automated capitalist society. I think Banks is a great inspiration, but it is not a world we will get by default. It needs active political effort.
This is abuse of power in these books, sometimes even quite blatant. Player of Games has probably the best example, since it has blackmail and extortion of a Culture citizen by an AI, with the help of a ship's Mind. Not to mention cheating at a board game.
That said, the Culture does seem like it would be a nice place to live, over all.
The Culture series of books are the most uplifting things I've read. They just make me feel great, especially the parts that take place on Orbitals (apart from the strange shit in the first book).
Abuse of power is absolutely an issue for a fully automated society. Ultimately, somebody is in control.
Take the current political situation in the US. Trump would love for everybody to blindly obey him. His autocratic goals are frustrated by the fact that government is made up of people who are able to resist the government they are part of if they believe it's going wrong. Without those people, Trump could count on the obedience of the literal machinery of government. Having people involved can be an extra layer of protection against abuse.
That statement makes no sense either, the Culture had an explicit department for abusing it's power, Special Circumstances.
I think his point was that even if you live in a post-scarcity anarcho-communist society where everyone is live and let live, the rest of the universe isn't an occasionally you need headbangers.
It's obviously more nuanced than that, but you'll end up in an argument of semantics pretty quickly. All the SC/Mind scheming is ultimately coming down to what we consider to be morally correct, so it'll be a discussion of whether e.g. letting a person die in order to serve a greater good constitutes abuse of power or not. The theme of the Culture series is what we would want to do if we could do anything we wanted, and there's not a clear-cut response to that. The egocentric part of the equation is reduced a lot.
Look at how little of the novels actually takes place within the borders of the culture though. The only place he can tell interesting stories is outside it, usually in neighbouring "primitive" societies - and the only way he can make relatable protagonists is to give them something equivalent to a job, despite this being supposedly extremely rare in the culture.
To the extent that people have a "need to be needed," we should ask ourselves what the most efficient way to meet that need is. Perhaps the answer is to keep "make-work" jobs around. Of course we'd hide the pointlessness of these jobs behind initiatives that "create jobs" and economic policies that "support small businesses" or "enforce fair trade." We've gotten really good at preventing workers (and perhaps ourselves) from knowing that the work they're doing is pointless.
The reality is that a lot of people already are doing the equivalent of receiving their basic income in exchange for digging and then filling in a big hole.
But maybe there's a cheaper way to meet people's "need to be needed" that's less wasteful of resources. Sports? Video game competitions? Intellectual debate? Volunteer work?
There are a lot of possibilities here. I'd love to find out.
In any case, I think it would be prudent to separate the debate about how people get most of their incomes from the debate about how people find meaning in their lives. Tying the two together is only one option and I'm not sure it's the right one.
Don't worry -- they'll get to play SimSteelFactory instead of working at (and possibly screwing up) a real steel factory. People can derive meaning from playing games.
This argument comes up time and again but I have never really seen someone attack it or someone substantiate the claim with studies or something. As far as I am concerned, I could not care less if I had no longer to work for a living.
If you're a typical HN reader you could probably retire to somewhere with a low cost of living tomorrow and live off your savings, or at worst you'd have to spend a few years saving up first. But you don't.
Long-term unemployed people whose cost of living is subsidized (in the US due to various legal quirks this is mainly disability) are generally substantially less happy than employed people. I don't have studies to hand but would you dispute that result?
The question is how will power be distributed between the owners of the automated plants and the 'subsistence' class? Will there be a true meritocracy, or will the children of the plant owners get all the best jobs? Judging from the way third world economies work, I would not assume the best. This I think is the reason for fear and protectionism.
In the US one party promises free education, free or reduced health care to the majority of the population, etc etc.
This party is still not in power. I don't think its a foregone conclusion that people vote themselves bread and circuses, which is I think your primary point.
On another front I find it hard to believe that UBI if it ever comes to the US will be set anywhere above poverty level. In that context anyone who voted to take money from people in poverty and use it to build roads they would probably be laughed out of office and rightly so.
The Democratic party does not credibly propose any of those things. Hillary Clinton explicitly rebuked Bernie Sanders' campaign promises with regards to health and education.
We have not yet seen a candidate running on a socialist proposal coupled with even mediocre or passable mediatic support. Every time a socialist-leaning candidate pops up, moneyed interests work really, really hard against them. However, it's getting better and better (see: Corbyn in UK).
It'll come. People will vote themselves, not bread and circuses, but health and education. And democracy and markets, as opposing decision-making mechanisms, will clash.
> I don't think its a foregone conclusion that people vote themselves bread and circuses, which is I think your primary point.
Or just populism in general - and I think "fear" is a stronger voter-pull than "want": fear of Mexican immigrants committing crimes, taking your job, fear of increased healthcare costs, etc.
As the majority of Americans do have health coverage it's a given that 51% of the population want cheaper coverage even if it means the other 49% will lose coverage then that's going to happen.
Is it really that simplistic? I would guess many wouldn't vote for cheaper coverage for them if it means that their parents/children/close friends lose coverage.
(Which is why politicians are so busy denying that anyone will lose coverage under their plans.)
Given the history of trying to build public support for moving UBI from $0 to >$0, probably the former, even if you switch the non-UBI factors, after wealthy interests who aren't on the benefitting side of redistribution get their propaganda in.
“People will always vote for the candidate that promises to increase public benefits they receive” is an attractive myth that doesn't actually play out in practice; in the US, it doesn't even play out in practice in primary elections within the major party most favorably inclined to public benefit programs.
" wealthy interests who aren't on the benefitting side of redistribution"
I don't think anybody wants to live in a society where 99% of population are suffering from hunger and lack of basic necessities. There will be no safety in such a society.
but there is always possibility of robot bodyguards!!!
I would assume that's because most people right now picture UBI as benefitting only lazy people etc. Once there is a UBI, they'll realize that they're also getting paid, and they'll be more likely to vote against people who want to cut it.
> Once there is a UBI, they'll realize that they're also getting paid
As with existing benefit programs, people will also realize that they are paying. And, as with benefit programs now, even people who are likely to benefit far more from the “being paid” part more than they lose to the “paying” part will often be prone to, and be encouraged by slick propaganda from moneyed interests to, identify with and vote for the interests of those who are on the other side of that equation instead of their own.
I think it would be important to tie UBI to key economic indicators and put any direct adjustments under the control of economists. We will need to limit politicians control of the purse strings.
> I think it would be important to tie UBI to key economic indicators
Better, just tie it to a defined relationship to a particular revenue stream; if it's capital-income-derived revenue, it's a good theoretical tie to the purpose of compensating for the displacement of labor in industry, and it's less subject to distortion than most economic indicators.
Then wouldn't you end up with a class of economists who are in a revolving door situation with financial institutions (who stand to benefit from networking with those controlling the purse strings), the same way we now have politicians converting to lobbyists (who benefit from networking with those controlling the political decision making)?
> The bad guys in David Weber's Honor Harrington novels are based on this idea.
Pedantically, the obvious “bad guys” in the earliest few, not the (so far, at least) principal bad guys of the whole series, who it turns out were also manipulating those obvious, early ones.
> It's an interesting take on what might happen.
It's kind of a shallow throwaway regurgitation of a standard argument without deep exploration or novel insight (which is okay, because it's not like Havenite society under the People's Republic is all that central a focus of any of the books, so shallow cartoonish broad strokes are fine.)
The bad guys in Baen published novels are just whoever the author doesn't like, usually anyone who isn't a Republican.
Though David Weber has his own pro-monarchy pro-libertarian ironically-not-racist thing going on, he just assigns random evil acts to random characters coincidentally named after his opponents, like having the Progressive Party actually be into human trafficking.
(When SF authors get old they all develop terrible opinions a while before anyone notices. Like Larry Niven wrote a book about the Green Party causing an ice age by stopping climate change and Arthur C Clarke became a pedophile. Heinlein, of course, started out that way.)
People don't necessarily want hand outs, they perhaps just want to live in an environment where they can sustain themselves through their own effort. Perhaps this is part of the reason HRC lost in November.
Centrists like HRC don't believe in giving you things for free, they want to watch you jump through hoops made of paperwork first. It's the TurboTax lobby at work.
What sort of corruption is possible when everything is done by machines. The greatest argument to privatized enterprise is efficiency, but how does that argument hold up with factories that are massively automated. Why are owners of such an enterprise needed at all?
If everything is automated then such companies need no owner as the ownership is to make sure the work gets done properly. It will be done properly no matter what the owners do. Why are they entitled to anything more than your average person.
I would think in the future you have shareholders, people who own the machines, that employ like a few workers who are managed by machines. And therefore those shareholders can just be just about anybody or even governments... who take the profit or revenue that enterprise generates and distribute it to the people.
I am talking about something like this sort of business which does not change, or grow much. It's a commodity. It can just be produced by pretty much anyone.
If we reach that point I would prefer to see people vote for government to construct new automated production facilities and provide their benefits to the people. Rather like how I think that voters should be able to vote for a government owned power plant, sewage treatment plant, library, broadband provider, etc. but I don't think they should be able to vote to seize the nearest privately owned book store for conversion to a public library.
If you build public facilities in parallel there's no unjust seizure of existing assets. (Some people will complain that it's unfair to allow the government to do anything at all that could reduce the profitability of existing private assets, but I don't think that those people make up a prohibitive share of the population.)
With the amount of unused capital that is available in the system these days... I don't know why anyone would, anyone should be able to buy machines and build their own factory. It's just that those assets would not be growth assets. In fact if anything I would think investors would not be interested in investing in that sort of enterprise... as the returns are nominal so it makes sense for governments to run these sorts of things like utilities.
Wouldn't such a society be predicated on the idea that everyone has a basic income - and these fully automated factories with no (state?) ownership would be relegated to producing the basic consumables that come along with a society that provides all the basics for survival and hygiene and ideally health (mental and physical)
As such, a society would find value in the skills of the populous which produce things that have a "human" value for having been created by a human.
Further, it would seem that the overall population would drop significantly. Especially as technology for automation iterates, machines will care for human basic needs, and will care for maintenance and production of other machines to keep the system going.
Will AI manage the overall resource supply chain?
It would be interesting to see a critically thought out matrix of all the roles which could be done by machine/automation/AI vs that which must require a human.
What about "soft" skills required to run a civilization; politics and law for example.
Where politics is fundamentally required to ensure stability of an economy and society such that humans can survive in an ordered world, it is clearly exploitable and shouldn't we be attempting to remove as much human cruft from that process as possible - but ensuring that human empathy remains. As machines cannot have empathy. (At what point do we trust "programmed empathy" in AI?)
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While there are all these efforts on ML to get machines to "see", say, cats in a picture, are there any efforts for teaching an AI to discern emotion in any given scenario?
Then ultimately, an AI will use all this to interpret intent...
>The people that want to learn will be incredibly leveraged and provide a ton of value to society. Those who don't want to learn should be given enough for basic subsistence. A stipend which covers food, shelter, clothing, catastrophic healthcare, reasonable water access, and unlimited data.
Great, so will that come before or after Donald Trump implements socialized medicine and free education? You're definitely going to get your automation, but the profits from that automation are going to accrue in the hands of a very, very small elite minority.
I'm starting to think that the tax rate on capital/profit should be somehow correlated with how advanced technology is. Increased technology -> greater productive leverage (inputs give more outputs) -> greater financial return. Thus, a larger cut should be used to better society overall, as the larger profits were made possible by the technology that a more advanced society enables.
This says nothing about _how_ that tax revenue should be spent. I think the current generation of government programs could be immensely improved. Worst case, if we are unable to increase the effectiveness of targeted government spending, then we just start cutting dividend checks. I will admit, this is the part I'm most uncertain about. Relatedly, I also think there is a lot of work we can do to vastly reduce the corruption and inefficiencies that are found in even the most modern governments.
The alternative would be letting those with the majority of capital increase their share of global wealth, as technology advances, at insane rates, and simply cross our fingers and hope they use their wealth wisely. Given that individuals have done nothing to bring about the tech that is present at the day of their birth, to me such a situation would feel incredibly unjust.
This is tricky stuff, however. My thoughts are slowly continuing to develop.
It's possible that simply cutting dividend checks would be enough. Market capitalism is an interesting sorta-self-regulating mechanism for seeking products and services, and the big drawback is that it isn't a social structure: nowhere in there is any suggestion that the mechanism will produce a consumer class to keep the whole thing going. Without that class, it collapses.
It's possible if you just harness the engine by forcibly redistributing capital amount X (nonlinear amount scaling from negative to positive) to all (citizens? humans? living things?) then you guarantee the consumer class's existence, and make it possible to compete for the capital of that class through producing goods and services.
You might call it the Square Tax. Pay one tenth of one percent of your income, squared… proceeds to be divvied up equally as a human dividend. That neatly results in one dollar for every thousand you make, squared (or one dollar per every 'K' of income, squared). It also means you hit a limit at exactly a million dollars of income a year. I think it's safe to say if you're in a basic income/human dividend society and you still contrive to earn a million dollars a year you need to re-evaluate what you're doing with your life, and/or you already have enough resources that you REALLY don't need to be working yourself into the grave to get more: believe it or not, other people can do things too ;)
the profits from that automation are going to accrue in the hands of a very, very small elite minority
Why would all profits from new efficiencies go to owners? Generally, efficiencies accrue to consumers through lower prices, unless there is some barrier to entry for that given market.
Furniture is a great example. In the past it was hand made, now much of the process is automated (machines size and cut the wood). That didn't make furniture makers more profitable, it just led to cheaper furniture for consumers.
> Generally, efficiencies accrue to consumers through lower prices
What good is that without a source of income from employment? Even UBI proposals are for far less than the current median income. At best the two will cancel each other out, though that is a pretty optimistic assumption since most of the motivation for automation is to reduce costs while maintaining prices and increasing profits.
motivation for automation is to reduce costs while maintaining prices and increasing profits
The same thing will happen when the cotton gin replaced manual labor back in 1793. Profits won't go to owners since anyone can buy a machine and offer a lower price as well.
The only time I've ever seen extra profits entirely captured by owners is when there are regulatory barriers to competition.
How about adding a very dark twist: pay people to not breed. Everything else would just be a buildup for universal suffering just a few generations down the line.
I don't think that is a viable thing because I think it would produce adverse reactions. It'd work out just fine for myself, but not so much for others. If someone is getting paid to stay child-free, does a woman get dinged for being pregnant while the man denies responsibility? Do we have everyone's DNA on file and run the baby's dna for possible matches? Do abortions count as staying child-free or does that deduct from the bonus? Does the child-free money mean that folks with children are doing a lot worse than single folks or childless couples? After all, they are now trying to feed more people yet have less money to work from. How do you handle folks breeding for religious reasons?
I'd much rather go with increased sex and child-rearing education partnered with free access to birth control and health care. Free voluntary sterilisation beginning at around 25, possibly with a one-time monetary payout, depending on how many previous children one has and their age (lower amounts for being older). Nudge folks to have few or zero children.
There's a lot of people in Texas with a lot of money and they sure as hell don't have easy access to birth control. The state's seemingly doing everything it can to obliterate it. The teenage pregnancy rates in some parts of Texas are similar to developing countries.
You wouldn't buy them unless you thought you needed them, or weren't already told blatant falsehoods about them. The level of medical disinforation in some states is truly staggering, especially those with abstinance-only policies like Texas.
I don't see how that couldn't be trivially tricked.
1) I sign up and get a reasonably high compensation, like 4x basic income
2) While I'm enjoying this period, I build up the skills to get an even more rewarding life situation
3) Move a country and enjoy things even better
Even if it would be permanent treatment for a high compensation over the years, I could freeze my juice and use it whenever I want it.
Right now, we allow immigration. If we continue that but pay people not to breed, then we're just getting rid of Americans. This is called "ethnic cleansing", and is frequently considered to be unacceptable.
You can't legitimately claim we have too many people while letting more arrive.
I'd add some more to that stipend - enough "stuff" that people can make their own art, and otherwise get started making physical things.
I get that part of the point of "unlimited data" is to provide people what they need to join the "productive elite". It's just there's ways people can be amazing that aren't information-based; thinking in terms of Diamond Age, you'd want everyone to have a matter stipend, as well.
In capitalism, the system trusts that companies that have already acquired some market and cashflow will continue to strive for more market share or expanded markets, or better profitability, even further the system depends upon that desire to advance our society and balance our markets.
When we talk of people, I think that still applies, we should both trust that most people won't just sit back and be satisfied with a static cashflow, and they will strive for something more.
People in developed societies tend to want more than the minimum. They want to invest time in something that makes them fulfilled and not merely spend their entire life raising babies. Further they recognize that given finite resources that they can do better for fewer kids.
This isn't much of a problem in current developed nations, I don't see a good reason to suppose it will become so.
Family focused people realize that finite resources available to them are best invested in fewer kids. How many of the people that find raising babies the fulfilling part are raising 8?
Perhaps change such a stipend to include comprehensive health care and actual education instead of just data.
Comprehensive health care, including birth control, tends to produce smaller families. Elder care would already be included with the food, shelter, and clothing portion of the stipend - so having someone to take care of you isn't a concern. Nor is having children to work in your factory or farm. Teach folks how to avoid having children: Teach them what to do if they want to have children. Teach them about child-rearing, teach them facts showing how spacing apart children makes for healthier children. Make sure to teach all this to both men and women, on top of other things.
The best part about these sort of things is that they tend to work, even in populations that traditionally have large families. The fact that these sorts of things tend to work alleviates my own personal fear of the population doubling and then doubling again. Some forms of religion might prove to be a difficult group at first, but I think that will be a small enough minority to not worry too much about it.
Why would you keep having more and more children when you didn't have to? I have it on good authority that most women aspire to do other things than just pop out as many as they can.
There are plenty of neighborhoods and even countries that might give you pause. There are plenty of people for whom having children is their only goal, their only live purpose, and the only meaningful thing they do in their life besides living.
In any population, there are sub-populations with higher and lower fertility.
Over time, because of differential reproduction, these sub-populations will eventually come to dominate, and form the majority of the whole population.
At that point, overall population increase begins and accelerates indefinitely until it hits a Malthusian wall of scarcity.
This process is the same regardless of what distinguishes the higher-fertility subgroups. It could be religion, or genes, or culture, or any combination of these. In any case, those characteristics will eventually dominate.
So one way or another, we will overpopulate and be forced to stop, unless we stop the process of high-fertility subgroup domination using some sort of long-term planning. In the end the only permanent solution may be some fixed-proportion guided reproduction regime, or perhaps a fixed genome mix that we maintain at all times. No natural gene recombination may be allowed, no natural mutations may be allowed to persist.
The current reprieve from this Malthusian tautology is the temporary result of the Industrial revolution and associated cultural shifts colliding with old-time cultural constructs. It couldn't last more than a century or so. Already, differential fertility of massive and obvious. Fertility of very conservative people is 2.35, of the most liberal it is 1.6. Subgroups like Amish, orthodox Jews, and conservative Muslims, and low-IQ people are rapidly growing in the population.
The Amish population doubles every 20-25 years; a simple calculation reveals they'll be hundreds of millions of people within a couple centuries, and billions a couple decades after that. They will grow until something stops their reproduction. The only question is what that something will be.
Evolution will win out in the end. Life finds a way. And it has all the time in the universe to do so.
When someone shows me a picture of exponential growth I always ask whether they're sure it isn't a sigmoid curve. In the case of population, extrapolations such as yours rest on the implicit assumption that motivating factors will never change.
For example, I was a bit surprised about your mention of the Amish population doubling, and went to read a few articles to learn more about that. Consider this quote from one in a Lancaster County, PA paper (which seems like a well-informed source since it sits in the middle of Amish country):
Ben Riehl, an Amish farmer, said the local settlement is growing “as fast or faster than it ever has.” However, he thinks families are getting somewhat smaller. A family may have five children these days, rather than nine or more.
He attributes that to the shift away from farming, a vocation that lends itself to large families.
Demographics are just not a one-way street. Certainly there are strong incentives and traditions to pop out lots of children in some contexts. But those incentives change, and do people's behaviors. We're going to be overrun by _________!' is a common anxiety that has been refuted over and over again by anthropological studies. It only makes sense in models where you assume everyone acts independently and populations and individuals don't really interact with each other.
Well, there's nothing that says the Amish are homogeneous or must stay that way.
Even among Amish, there will be some sub-groups where fertility falls, and others where it stays the same or rises.
So, the Amish who reduce fertility (like those you quoted) will eventually be outnumbered by those other groups of Amish who continued to reproduce at higher rates.
Even if the differential is tiny, and the high-population group is initially a single individual, it will eventually dominate. Heck, even with zero high-fertility sub-population, one will eventually mutate into existence and then dominate. This is evolution.
Maybe it'll be 50 years, or 150, or 1,000 years. What you're saying could affect the timing of the wheat-and-chessboard outcome, but it doesn't change that outcome.
>Demographics are just not a one-way street. Certainly there are strong incentives and traditions to pop out lots of children in some contexts. But those incentives change, and do people's behaviors.
You're still imagining that the base "rules" like human nature are invariant. For example, you're talking about "incentives", as though people respond to incentives in fixed ways.
But they don't. Even if the incentives change to encourage low populations, some subgroup will quasi-irrationally ignore those incentives any over-reproduce anyway. Eventually, that subgroup and their quasi-irrational characteristics will dominate.
>We're going to be overrun by _________!' is a common anxiety that has been refuted over and over again by anthropological studies. It only makes sense in models where you assume everyone acts independently and populations and individuals don't really interact with each other.
Well first, you seem to be making some implied xenophobia accusation. Nothing in my comment identified any "we" nor any "_blank_" that "we" would be overrun by. This has nothing to do with fear. I simply said something about population dynamics that applied to all organisms of all species everywhere.
In addition, usually the identity lines aren't that clear and my point doesn't require them to be. I clearly talked about sub-populations who come to dominate their identity group, which is different from one identity group dominating another. Both can occur.
I'd ask that you please don't imply in some accusation of irrational immoral xenophobia on my part, and don't attribute emotions like xenophobic "anxiety" to me without me stating them. It's just not productive.
Regarding your narrow point, 'We're going to be overrun by _________!' has not been refuted. Quite the opposite - historically, it's come true many, many times: Native Americans got overrun by fast-breeding Europeans. Ainu were overrun by fast-breeding Japanese. Berbers were overrun by Arabs. Many ancient tribes overran other tribes (e.g. Zulu overran many other tribes). And so on.
>When someone shows me a picture of exponential growth I always ask whether they're sure it isn't a sigmoid curve.
I agree in general. But here's why I'm sure this isn't a sigmoid curve: Life began on Earth 3.8 billion years ago and population has always been exponential for every species, anywhere, ever.
The only major exception I can think of is humans since the industrial revolution, and evidence shows that this is temporary. I'd be happy to hear about other examples (though I suspect they'd also be temporary or very strange exceptions that prove the rule).
If we want it to be a sigmoid curve, we must choose to make it a sigmoid curve using policy.
Also - If you think the Flynn effect (measured increases in average IQ over time) contradicts the hypothesis that low-IQ people have more kids, you're confused. Both can be true at the same time, if the Flynn effect is due to environmental changes and not eugenic breeding (which seems to be scientists' tentative conclusion right now).
Right, but what if one is not the cause of the other, but rather they both have the same root cause. e.g. Well-off people have a personality that both makes them less likely to procreate and also likely to be a big earner.
Then, you give people that don't have that personality trait a bunch of money, you can't expect that persons behavior to be the same.
As I understood, there is a causal relationship. Not needing children to support you when you get old, and being able to get your first couple of kids past the infant mortality barrier, tend to result in fewer children overall.
Not everyone is capable of being a thought worker, but most people desire to feel useful. Providing UBI is just the tip of the iceberg, what you are proposing requires an unprecedented sea change in human psychology.
Human psychology, probably not. Western psychology, most definitely. People don't even ask who your family is or where do you live anymore. The first question is always, what do you do?
That is simply a reflection of what folks find important. It used to be important who your family was, as it kind of indicated your place in society and contributed to a stereotype. Same for your residence.
It just isn't as important as important as what you do for a living as it doesn't say anything about you like your career choice does. That is, unless it seems like an interesting and defining factor.
I personally get asked where I'm from quite often - well before anyone asks me what my job is. I'm an immigrant and speak with an accent. The job is secondary: i'll occasionally get asked if I wound up in Norway for work, other times folks will occasionally ask somewhere in the conversation. My accent makes it less of a defining characteristic.
The other thing I'll state is that you can answer the question differently so that you are in control over what defines you. You might have a McJob. Nothing to write home about, but you don't mind it so much and it pays the bills. But you program/make music/artwork/have hobbies in your free time. Answer that bit. Make the job secondary. Ask the question to others differently. It might not become popular in the whole of society, but you might be happier in your personal interactions.
>The other two are completely irrelevant to anyone but yourself.
Are they really tho? To know where you are going, you first need to learn where you came from. This also applies to other humans, knowing a bit about their background helps you empathize better with them and understand their reasoning better.
In that regard "job" has become the new class to a certain degree. Tell somebody what you are working and many people will base their whole idea about you on just that. Even tho you might not even like working that job and are pretty much forced to do it due to a lack of better options.
This also has the effect that specialization is considered the peak of knowledge, while jack-of-all-trade skills are increasingly undervalued. You either spent large parts of your whole life pursuing that one specific thing or you are considered a screw-up by many people.
I often talk about the need to preserve the right to work for the masses. Many people rebut this with the idea that work is coerced for the masses and that it should not be. These are actually essentially unrelated issues. Wanting to not coerce people into working is not at all incompatible with my position. In theory, they both advocate greater choice.
Unfortunately, in practice, people who are pro UBI are often taking a position that is highly likely to deny people choice rather than grant them greater choice. When Elon Musk and Sam Altman talk about creating a UBI, they talk about the need for it due to the expectation that robots will displace people and there will be widespread, permanent unemployment. The articles with interviews from them then tell glowing, affectionate stories of how UBI can supplement your current low wage job and make your life better. They never actually write about the scenario being proposed: A world in which large numbers of people have no hope of getting paid work.
This scares me because people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are job creators. And their vision of the future is "We eliminate your jobs, cut you a check for a pittance and call it even, then wash our hands of your pathetic future. Not our problem. You have your UBI." In the last Industrial Revolution when automation was threatening to eliminate jobs, we created the 40 hour work week to redistribute work more evenly and raise quality of life for the masses. We need the next step in the evolution of work here.
I find it frustrating that this seems to be so hard to get across to people. But, earlier today, I left a comment elsewhere on HN* in which I noted that some quadriplegics can work and that I was mentioning this because new quadriplegics are often suicidal, feeling like life is over. Maybe think of it in those terms. For many people, UBI in a world with drastically fewer jobs would be like a tragic accident cutting you off from the ability to work. People seem able to understand how horrifying it is to be quadriplegic and feel completely useless. Why can't you understand how horrifying that would be if you are "the wrong kind of employee" and your job has been eliminated and now you are being handed some check for less money than you made previously and basically being told "Fuck you. You are useless and don't deserve a job."
UBI and preserving the right to work are not necessarily antithetical. The problem is that most people who talk about UBI don't see that preserving the right to work is not going to just happen. It needs to be made to happen. And when job creators like Sam Altman are all "meh, you have your ubi, you don't need access to paid work" you are talking about a horrifying dystopian future which will almost certainly end in bloody revolution. Large numbers of unemployed people who have no hope of getting a job, time on their hands and just enough money to keep themselves fed but no hope of ever returning to a middle class lifestyle would make for a scary army.
I would be suicidal in that situation. But quite a lot of people would be homicidal, in part because it would be legitimate to feel this had been done to them. This is really not a scenario we need to create in the world.
Well said. I will now try to look from the perspective of a business owner, that has automated everything and doesn't need employees anymore. Let's look at the extreme case, where suddenly (e.g. in 10 years) all business in the world is 100% automated and owned by a handful of people and there is no UBI for the rest. As you rightly pointed out, a kind of revolt is to be expected, which however would be suppressed by the 100% automated police, which would place those poor rebels in a 100% automated jail or just get rid of them in some other 100% automated way. In the end all that's gonna remain is the handful of businessman, who only produce and trade goods between themselves. The amount of goods produced and traded will decrease drastically, which will be detrimental to the government (tax income), which by that time will probably be 100% automated as well. At this point in time, an optimist would inevitably notice that carbon footprint and pollution will also be drastically reduced. However, as business usually goes, those handful of businesses will compete with each other until there is eventually only one business left. There would inevitably be a moment of immense happiness and satisfaction for the one and undisputed winner of this game, but then life will just become boring. The guy will wander around, discuss this with his 100% automated personal assistant, think about it, maybe meditate a bit and would eventually decide look for fun at some other place (e.g. Mars). However, there will still remain some sneaky feeling in the back of his head, asking whether UBI would have actually been a better idea in the first place.
When people talk about UBI as a solution for machines taking all the work, they can't be sure the machines will take all the work, but they can be absolutely sure 99% of the people will need to retrain, maybe for years, and try again and again until they find something worthwhile. And our current society simply does not allow that.
Another certainty is that for a long while salaries will trend down. Because machines will displace people faster than those people can move around. Without a support structure, we risk people averaging less than what they need to survive, for a looong while.
Besides, labor that comes with personal realization is rare even now, with plenty of jobs around. If we want people to have personal realization we must set things so that those people don't need their salary to live. At least not every month.
I was formerly a UBI proponent but I think, at least, in the near to medium term, it's too much of a cultural shift about the role of work in life. That's why these days I'm more a fan of a negative income tax coupled with a repeal of the minimum wage. Consider if the "tax brackets" were something like:
(Something like that, exact numbers to be fiddled with.)
What it essentially does is it provides a government money multiplier on low wage jobs. A company could offer $1/hr jobs, which the employee would perceive as $10/hr. That is, $1/hr = $2k/yr = $20k, after taxes. The negative income tax benefit decreases steadily, until eventually you start paying taxes, but there's always an incentive to work more or get a raise.
Just think of it! At $1/hr there would be a gazillion jobs for things like greeters at every store, crosswalk guards, picking up trash at the park. And people would be motivated to work for them because they're actually making $10/hr.
I think this is more politically palatable than UBI as well, too, since it avoids the issue of "moochers who will just sit around and collect their checks". Since with a NIT, if you don't work, you don't get anything.
I do foresee some issues making this actually feasible. For example, it certainly won't work for the employee to just receive $1/hr and then a big payout on tax day. I think we could adjust "withholding" to actually pay out what the employee will receive as part of their tax benefit, but it will be important to get it right or else they could be hit with a bad tax bill.
> I was formerly a UBI proponent but I think, at least, in the near to medium term, it's too much of a cultural shift about the role of work in life. That's why these days I'm more a fan of a negative income tax coupled with a repeal of the minimum wage.
As usually defined, negative income tax (in an otherwise progressive income tax system) is the same as UBI in a progressive income tax system, but possibly with a range of regressive treatment (the simple credit form is isomorphic to UBI, the more common “deduction with proportional refund of unused deduction, usually at a high fraction like 50%”, has the regressiveness feature.
Unless the credited (or refundable proportion of the deduction) amount is greater than the annualized pre-policy-chnage minimum wage, it's also a decrease in the wage+credit income floor for full-time employed workers, so you risk pitting the unemployed against the working poor with this approach. A better approach, IMO, at plausibly-viable initial levels of the credit (effectively, the UBI level) is to index minimum wage to inflation, but reduce it, as an hourly wage (after applying the index) by the amount of the credit, divided by 2000.
(I'd also prefer tying the credit to a defined calculation based on a revenue stream, preferably a capital-income-heavy one, so it doesn't get reduced with automation, with a ratchet to prevent cuts in recessions.)
What you actually describe is progressive system where the bottom marginal rate is a large negative value, which isn't a typical NIT, but sort of like a super-EITC. This provides no benefit to those absolutely displaced from work, but maximum benefit to those employed at a rate which exactly exhausts the negative marginal rate brackets.
What's wrong with moochers collecting cheques? Is there some inherent value to you in there being no moochers out there? Or to put it another way, is it necessary to monetize all valuable interactions and behaviours so that we can reward them with our negative income tax? Is monetisation itself a good thing? Or is it sometimes a bad thing, but a tool, possibly not always appropriate?
I see this as merely a more complicated type of messaging and find the math of it to be... weird.
If I make no money, what stops me and a friend from starting two poem writing companies. He pays me 2k a year to write him a couple poems and I pay him 2k a year to write me a couple poems. Both of us end up making 18k a year profit and neither of us has to work.
It's a silly example, but the point is that not providing UBI to people who don't work... just means you create corruption to provide just enough work to get past the bar. So why bother?
Yes, we do want to incentivize productive behavior but denying UBI won't work and the harder you try to make rules as what qualifies as productive, the more you end up distorting the labor market.
How about caring for your elderly parents? Or a mother looking after 3 children at home? Or cleaning up the common areas on the estate where you live? Are these worthless because they're unpaid?
What you call moochers, I call customers: please don't ignore the value of consumption in a market capitalist system. If I intend to prosper I need to come up with a way to sell those people something, and your 'moochers' might be the only people with time on their hands to investigate value and serve as watchdogs for abuses. Also, they'd have time to learn new things and invent new stuff. Don't underestimate the ingenuity of moochers! People get bored and think up things when they're left just sitting around. Perhaps not all of them, but it's still an important mechanism.
> This scares me because people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are job creators.
No, they aren't. “Job creators” aren't a thing. They are labor purchasers, but that's only incidental and to the extent that labor has no cheaper substitute for their commercial users.
The true job creators are the people who fill whatever is the bottleneck for demanding new jobs.
For industries and products where capacity exists but production is limited by demand, more people buying their products create jobs (and more capitalists won't).
For industries and products did not exist despite people wanting it, R&D who create those products create new jobs, and people wanting such products don't - the jobs won't ever happen unless/until the particular product gets developed.
For industries and products where volume is limited by outside competition, local jobs are created by effective management and capital investments that make production more effective and bring/keep the jobs locally. In any case, the main initiative for change and the possibility for action comes from the factory, and not from the consumers.
Statement "The factories are just arbitrage between demand and raw materials." has truth only for pure commodity industries - and is not at all true for companies like those built by Sam Altman and Elon Musk given as examples above.
If nobody wanted cars then Tesla would be bankrupt. People wanting cars creates jobs for those in the car manufacturing business. If Tesla makes a better car, they might have more people working for them over time.
It's hard to say if that creates any jobs at all, or simply shifts jobs from other companies that make cars. A lot of the companies in the Sam Altman portfolio are involved in "disruption", which is to say, shifting jobs from one company to another. They're not net creators. In many cases these companies succeed because they require fewer people to operate, so they're job destroying by nature. Wether or not that's a bad thing is irrelevant here, it's just a fact.
The only thing that actually creates jobs is demand, and the only way to create demand is to radically reshape what society is. The automobile created a huge shift in demand: Many people wanted a car because of the economic opportunity it brought, and with the car came other opportunities, like owning a house in the suburbs, owning a cottage, travelling more, and so on. It encouraged people to take on debt, to spend money they normally wouldn't spend, and to work harder to afford it.
There hasn't been anything quite as profound as that in the last century. The introduction of the internet has, if anything, eliminated demand for many things previously taken for granted like print media.
I'd agree with the suspicion that UBI alone is not sufficient to handle our future economy. Though I'm not sure you have the right breakdown with what might be needed beyond UBI.
I've been feeling that in order to really accelerate/maintain a future economy beyond our current stagnation, some improved capital circulation mechanism is needed to release huge accumulations of capital from essentially centralized controls. This could be accomplished via multiple methods on a spectrum of compulsory / voluntary scale. From proposed taxes on capital or enticements to apply capital in non-traditional/higher-risk paths. If you can cause mega-accumulations of capital to actually circulate, I think that there would basically be no problem for people looking for work to find it.
Though I'm not sure you have the right breakdown with what might be needed beyond UBI.
My comment was in no way intended to be comprehensive. A more comprehensive picture includes a need for universal basic health coverage and real solutions to the huge affordable housing crisis that has been going on for decades and only getting worse.
I write about my views on what I see as The Second Industrial Revolution and try to gather related posts here:
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that it was. I'll give that link a read as it seems we're somewhat on the same page in this area.
With respect the the housing affordability crisis: One symptom of capital accumulation is that competes with regular people for housing. Capital accumulation hurts housing prices to the extent that parking capital in housing that is being used by no one, or being used to just own housing and provide landlord income with a low positive benefit to society. As long is it's cheaper to buy existing houses and rent them vs deploying that same capital to building houses and selling them we will have an affordable housing crisis. And that is just one aspect of stagnant capital accumulation.
One of the problems is that average house size has more than doubled since the 1950s. Meanwhile, average number of people living in houses has shrunk, from about 3.5 to about 2.5, iirc. We also eliminated a lot of SROs and other housing well suited to single adults and childless couples. This occurred at a time when such housing wasn't really needed, but it was not brought back as demographics changed.
Maybe as the true wealth of the world grows massively due to productivity provided by automation the check we cut people shouldn't be what current people consider a pittance enough to live a waste of a life.
We are either feel a moral duty to keep those who don't contribute in poverty or believe we need to incentivize the rest of the slackers to keep their noses to the useless grindstone.
We can either keep both the useless moralizing and the social carrot long after they cease to make sense or we can recognize that sharing the wealth of the world makes increasing sense and lift each other up in lives where we make the meaning rather than finding it in doing pointless work.
Let me briefly restate the gist of my point above:
UBI or no UBI, we need to preserve access to paid work for everyone to the best of our ability. We need to recognize a right to work that is not being discussed by most people who are pro UBI.
The value of the benefits granted by welfare programs are always eroded over time by inflation. What sounds like a lot of money today will become a pittance over time. These feel good, idealistic ideas touted by so many people seem to never recognize that if you have a UBI and no means whatsoever to improve your income beyond that because the tech giants have no plans to redistribute work, then you are pretty well fucked and your life is hopeless.
People like you seem to be big on the idea that people should not be compelled to work. I am not talking about compelling people to work. I am talking about not actively denying them the right to access paid work. There is a difference between the two, and it is actually quite large.
> UBI or no UBI, we need to preserve access to paid work for everyone to the best of our ability.
No - we don't need to preserve access to paid work.
We want to enable people to work to benefit themselves, rather then their employer.
> The value of the benefits granted by welfare programs are always eroded over time by inflation
Governments can set both inflation, and benefits. Not increasing the latter to keep pace with the former is a deliberate political choice, primarily for the benefit of the rich.
My phrasing does not presume the individual is an employee per se. Paid work also includes contract work, freelance work and owning your own small business.
Can you elaborate on what exactly do you mean by "right to paid work" in a world where a true market price for the work of many people will be approximately zero?
UBI is a solution for the problem where for a large part of society a honest full day's work is economically worthless, the society has no real need for their labor. If this wouldn't be expected to happen, then we wouldn't have to discuss UBI as much, but that's where we're heading.
I can even imagine a not-so-far future where the value of most work would be negative; i.e. we might involve people in producing some item, but it would be cheaper and more effective if they stayed away and didn't try to help; so all such work would be in essence a glorified crafts hobby with no practical purpose, and it would result in costs instead of payment.
I probably cannot do it justice in a comment here, but, in a nutshell, there is a lot of unpaid work in the world. As one example, women's work is often unpaid. When it is turned into a paid job, it often pays really poorly.
Historically, women's work was compensated by a strong sense of family obligation. Men were expected to marry and/or support women they had sex with, especially if they got them pregnant. There is less and less expectation that a man is obligated to support a woman. There is more expectation that she can also go out and get a job, which sort of works if there are no children, except that very often due to social expectations, a lot of her time and energy still goes into traditional women's work. The social contract has become broken in a one-sided manner.
On Hacker News, you see people routinely say that content creators on the web are not entitled to be paid for their work, yet they expect there to be good, high level content readily available. And they expect fresh content to be constantly produced. A very high percentage of people on HN use adblockers and then say 'Not my problem" about how that is destroying the income of not just small time operators, but even long standing, established and respected publications. They often say things like "get a real job" when I comment on "So, how are writers supposed to get paid?" They expect writing to be done for free on a regular basis, basically.
There is plenty of work happening right now that isn't getting compensated and that people who make a far better than average hourly wage don't seem to think deserves compensation. So, I see a future in which people with UBI are doing valuable work like content creation while not being paid for it. I would much rather we figure out a better means to monetize work being done right here, right now instead of acting like "work is simply going the way of the dinosaur." No, it isn't. But many people simply don't want to pay the people doing the work.
In a tribal culture, if the tribe makes a big kill, everyone eats. The high ranking people may get the better cuts of meat, but no one goes hungry. They are considered part of the extended family in some sense. This sense of obligation has eroded and an awful lot of people simply seem blind to the many things that must happen that are needed in this world and are valuable, but that they don't want to pay for.
There was a discussion on HN recently in which someone said that the US has 5% of the world population, but 22% of the world's prisoners (IIRC). And it is not illegal in this country to treat prisoners as slave labor. So there is apparently a vast prison industrial complex churning out cheap products using slave labor where the workers are not paid. There is insufficient hue and cry over this situation.
We need very much to design a world in which more people have access to the means to create wealth for themselves. If we are going to displace our historical practice of feeling familial or tribal obligation to take some minimum level of care and provisioning of everyone, then, no, just giving money is not enough. We need to give the means to make money.
Most wealthy people who get called millionaires or billionaires do not actually have a checking account with a million or a billion dollars in it. They have assets like stocks and bonds and land. These constitute a means to make money. When you give poor people money, but you deny them the means to make money, you are in no way giving them the life that rich people have. Rich people can get more if they want it or need it. UBI would be a fixed amount. And if it wasn't enough, well, fuck you.
The type of work that you list is work where it won't be paid work - I mean, whatever system you create so that people get paid for it is in some way UBI in disguise; the market value for that work is near zero (as you say, people simply don't want to pay the people doing that work), so you may get paid "for" that work, but de facto you'll get paid just because. No matter if you frame such transfer payments as charity or as forced redistribution, it's not payment for the work, it's paid because the society decided to pay you despite the work having no economic value - as in the principle you mention, that the tribe gets a big kill and everyone eats; just because they're part of the tribe and not because of the work they do.
I understand your arguments of going above and beyond that, having much more than UBI - however, as you can see in this thread, even that level is quite contentious, a large jump from the current situation and not guaranteed to happen. Going beyond that is, obviously, even less likely to happen. If/when we'll see a realistic support for UBI, then we may start discussing about maybe implementing what you state, right now it's just wishful thinking.
Currently, UBI is also wishful thinking. So why not wish for something that doesn't disempower the masses instead of something that does?
The world does not have to bend to my will. But I also do not have to bend to its. I can continue to desire a better system for how we treat people, no matter how ridiculous that seems to so many people.
I'm all for the right to work, I just really don't think jobs are at all necessary to provide that right.
> people like Sam Altman and Elon Musk are job creators. And their vision of the future is "We eliminate your jobs, cut you a check for a pittance and call it even, then wash our hands of your pathetic future. Not our problem.
People are quite capable of finding something to do on their own without being forced into by the necessity of earning a wage. People write blogs, build cars from kits, maintain gardens, volunteer, raise kids, make youtube videos, play in bands, perfect recipes, etc... frequently for little or no monetary compensation.
To presume that people need Sam Altman and Elon Musk to make jobs so that people can leading fulfilling lives is incredibly dismissive of people's capabilities.
> For many people, UBI in a world with drastically fewer jobs would be like a tragic accident cutting you off from the ability to work.
Our present alternative to UBI is the idiotic combination of unemployment/welfare and a minimum wage. We either pay you to not work (distorting the labor market), or we force employers to provide a basic income at an above market rate (also distorting the labor market). Any jobs that don't provide enough value to the employer don't exist.
By gradually decoupling jobs from providing a basic standard of living to our citizens, we allow them to choose what type of work to occupy themselves. If they wish to occupy themselves with something we can automate at an equivalent quality level for a certain price, they simply need to beat that price. They can do this because they receive UBI and any further income provides an improved quality of life.
> Why can't you understand how horrifying that would be if you are "the wrong kind of employee" and your job has been eliminated and now you are being handed some check for less money than you made previously and basically being told "Fuck you. You are useless and don't deserve a job."
Someone should not have a right to force other people to pay higher prices just because someone thinks they should be paid a certain amount to do their job. Many of my friends who graduated from college in 2008 and 2009 struggled to find decent paying jobs. Why should they have to pay higher prices so that someone who does have a decent paying job can hold onto it?
> In the last Industrial Revolution when automation was threatening to eliminate jobs, we created the 40 hour work week to redistribute work more evenly and raise quality of life for the masses.
I'm pretty sure supporters of the 8hr day were primarily concerned with the health and well being of workers, not with reducing unemployment. Given that the process of implementing the 40 hr week took almost 150 years, it's pretty hard to tie it to automation eliminating jobs.
> you are talking about a horrifying dystopian future which will almost certainly end in bloody revolution. Large numbers of unemployed people who have no hope of getting a job, time on their hands and just enough money to keep themselves fed but no hope of ever returning to a middle class lifestyle would make for a scary army.
While idle peasants certainly scare the capitalists, I think that the threat of violent revolution has been radically diminished by our unprecedented success in inventing new forms of entertainment. Violent revolution is also no longer practical in developed countries given the governments surveillance and military capabilities
Our current situation where people do pointless, mind numbing and demeaning work just to survive leads to plenty of depression and suicidality.
Paying for someone else's healthcare shows compassion.
Not paying for someone else's healthcare does not indicate a lack thereof.
A line needs to be drawn somewhere, and many Americans seem to draw that line as "primary rights need to be protected, and all else is every man for himself". Let's say you really want new Macbook Pro. It costs a lot more money than you got. So someone else in society pays for it. Ok, same situation, but someone else doesn't wanna pay for it. Does that really make them a person without compassion.
The suggestion that someone not having the money to buy a fancy computer and someone not having the money to buy healthcare are equivalent is an odd way of looking at the world.
If those who didn't have a Macbook Pro were going to die then compassionate people would be buying luxury laptops for everyone around them.
That's a slippery slope to argue on because eventually everyone is going to die. Where do you draw the line? Your post is ironic, because macs are overpriced, by some measure, and so is the american healthcare, from what I heard. Apple is said to derive value from exclusiveness (price differentiation). I'm not going to draw the analogy for medicine, although medication is controversial enough.
Surely, nobody is going to die from not owning a macbook, that's indeed a strawman. A macbook is not a condition, but a property.
Living with a Macbook (insert any useful technology here) improves your life.
Living without disease/sickness/things medical care provides improves your life.
I don't think it's a straw man. As you said, no amount of medical care can stave off death indefinitely, so I'm not sure why it matters if "nobody is going to die" from not owning a MacBook if nobody is going to live forever from getting medical care. In fact, plenty of people die even after they've received cutting edge care / insanely expensive procedures.
Moochers looking for fun ways to spend their free money.
(it boggles my mind how often people see an artificial consumer class as some kind of money sink into which the 'good' people dump their hard earned dollars. This is madness. What you're looking at in that event is a money ocean made up of would-be customers you just aren't selling to yet, and handled properly it's a titanic resource for anybody who DOES want to provide value and be compensated. You can't get paid unless there's people out there with liquid resources who are free to pay you if they like your stuff.)
>We should not be employing people in jobs that can be automated. We should try and automate everything.
Suppose that automation can be automated. Not that implausible, really. Will we just sit in a corner waiting through eternity on the machines to appear on their own?
I like theorizing too, but we've gotta live in the meantime.
One easy way around this is to do what all the NYC foundations do. That is, give to other people's charities, and they in turn will give to yours. That is only small potatoes compared to donating to a political campaign and taking the money you don't spend on the campaign off the table tax free. A lot more things make sense through that lens. I could imagine a situation where Google who doesn't benefit from every OSS project, gives to project that Facebook benefits from, and Facebook to one's that Google does ad infinitem.
