Robots Aren’t Killing the American Dream

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/20/opinion/no-robots-arent-killing-the-american-dream.html

by kawera • 9 years ago

120 320 9 years ago

nytimes.com

leereeves• 9 years ago

The economy can’t flourish without trade and immigrants.

How is it that China flourishes with limited immigration and restricted trade?

krapht• 9 years ago

Define flourishes. Being poor in China is 10x worse than being poor in the West.

muninn_2• 9 years ago

Sure. And like 50 years ago Mao wrecked the entire country.

Mikeb85• 9 years ago

China has the world's second largest economy and is growing at an astronomical rate. Keep in mind where they were at only one generation ago...

adrianN• 9 years ago

In China more people are leaving poverty every year than anywhere else in the world.

yesbut• 9 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism

_moin_• 9 years ago

China flourishes Yea, lets be more like China, the leader in "quality of life" metric. /s

patcheudor• 9 years ago

For China, replace immigration with movement of people from rural to urban. It's a big country and they've been undergoing dramatic population shifts. We don't have that luxury in the west. Also define flourishing economy. They are hurting pretty badly as well.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/chinas-economic-problems-wi...

wklauss3• 9 years ago

How is it that China flourishes without immigrants and with restricted trade?

China has a lot of immigrants. Mostly from rural areas to urban areas. They are Chinese, sure, but because the different laws governing rural areas vs. cities they might as well be from another country. These cities (Shenzen, Hong Kong, Shanghai...) work with special trade regulations that are comparable to any other free-market countries around the world.

marknutter12• 9 years ago

That's... some incredible doublespeak there.

drzaiusapelord7• 9 years ago

Because it has a massive population surplus of people who have not entered the industrialized urban centers where modern economies need talent and where the non-barely above poverty jobs are for the Chinese. For countries without surplus rural workers making barely above poverty, immigration is required, especially when we need skillsets that aren't growing domestically as fast as we need to fill open positions.

China has 380m people making about $4-$10 a day in rural areas dying to migrate to better living conditions. That's more workers in rural areas than the US has people in total: men, women, children, students, retired, etc. These situations aren't comparable.

http://www.realclearworld.com/articles/2016/09/16/china_is_s...

As of 2014, over half of China’s roughly 770 million employed workers were urban workers. The problem is that the other half – almost 380 million people – are employed in rural areas. The urban households aren’t exactly raking it in, but the rural households have not progressed far enough beyond the World Bank’s arbitrary $3.10 to say they have escaped much of anything, and certainly not poverty.

candiodari• 9 years ago

I don't know if you've visited a place like Hong Kong, but the short answer is this :

Those cities are full of immigrants, taking up the badly paid shit jobs. They're all Chinese immigrating into China so "it's not immigration", but only in the same way Polish workers in the UK are "not immigrants" (not meant pejoratively, and frankly I admire what those people in the UK do, they deserve to be treated better than the British treat them. On the other hand, I do understand why the British labour class doesn't like them : they depress wages, conditions, and opportunity).

China is a country of 1 billion people. A slight minority, let's say 400 million people, live in the countryside (ie. everywhere except for some 30 dots on the map). Not in abject poverty (certainly not compared to 20 years ago), but certainly making a LOT less money than they do in cities and living in nicer natural environments, but worse conditions. So they migrate to the cities, take total shit jobs, and slowly become part of the Chinese cities.

This process has started, but is far from finishing (although I do think it's more than halfway through, but it's got another decade or so before it fizzles out)

So TLDR: China is not doing this without immigration at all. It's just that it doesn't really look like immigration for the same reason that the pretty sizable migration out of Chicago doesn't really look like immigration.

pizzetta• 9 years ago

That describes internal migration rather than immigration (international migration). In the end the results may be similar, but it's a different thing. You can't be deported out of China (though you can be sent back to your village) but they are generally speaking the same culture and people, for the majority of cases. Every large country which has transformed from agrarian to industrial has gone through this internal migration phase. From former USSR down to Bolivia or Mali.

gumby• 9 years ago

China has a huge unemployment problem and heavily restricts internal migration. The hukou /internal passport system sends unauthorized immigrants from the countryside into an "illegal alien" system. Without the right passes, your kids don't get into school, you can't rent a home etc. If you look at country-sized subregions of China (e.g. Shanghai region, guanghzou) the economics and dynamics parallel those of the USA.

And china is a WTO member; if you look at it honestly, its trade is not more restricted than the US. Yes, it does try to make its own special standards, but they are similar to what the US does (e.g. with automative regulations or electronics regulations) -- it's simply that the US is a far more valuable market so people are more willing to jump through the necessary hoops).

Yes the US is even more open, but part of that is via agreements (like the now dead TPP) that were specifically intended to give preference to countries that were not China.

As for "flourishing"...let's just say that most of the poorest quintile in the US are wealthier and healthier than most of the richest quintile in China. Any absolute growth from a small number is a relatively large percentage.

Note: I am very much opposed to Chinese policies in many areas including the ones described above. But I can form that opinion without cliches like you hear from politicians).

Bartweiss4• 9 years ago

This is a great summary - China has quite a bit of immigration (in an odd, internal sense) and engages in massive amounts of trade regardless of the tariff and dumping questions people bring up.

On the flourishing point, I'd just add that China is struggling with flourishing not just on an individual wealth level but on a structural macroeconomic level. The move from state-sponsored heavy industries to consumer goods is still in huge jeopardy, and while its growing rapidly China is working hard to circumvent economic crisis.

danm072• 9 years ago

Growth is not a function of immigration, but of population size. Immigration itself is just a means to get more people. It also increases diversity, which is like bringing in new people in into a company, which is always stirs things up... in a good way, most of the time.

niftich• 9 years ago

They have a large domestic population of people willing (~needing) to perform work despite scant worker protections, forming continuous domestic rural-to-urban migration; they have plentiful extractable raw materials and aren't particularly concerned about the environment; they are able and willing to take on government debt partly because internationally their combined their military and economic might doesn't make it very likely that anyone will bother to collect.

The problem is as China's acquiring a "middle-class" that begins to resemble its American counterpart in the 1950s, the pool of people in China who will do just about any job is decreasing. Middle-class people use their increased economic security to develop a sense of vested agency and are less likely to voluntarily let their living and working standards dip. Therefore, the most exploitative production is moving out of the Chinese mainstream and into the rural fringes of its own society, or elsewhere altogether.

mc32• 9 years ago

Or Japan. Despite low birth rates low immigration and a less open economy, rigid educational system, rigid new graduate hiring system, it's still the no. 3 economy in the world.

alphonsegaston• 9 years ago

This is because it's functionally a part of the American empire with all the economic benefits that brings. It never would have rose to prominence nor will it maintain this position without US backing of its economy/security. This is why Abe has been so desperately scrambling to buddy up with Trump.

It may have an alternate future underneath the umbrella of a Chinese empire, but would likely being strangled by the compounded corruption.

gthtjtkt2• 9 years ago

Yeah, that sentence stood out to me too. Kind of like starting a philosophical debate with the statement "Obviously God exists, so I will now proceed with the other parts of my argument". Definitely not as axiomatic as the author assumes.

And even if our current economy truly can't flourish without immigrants and trade, there's still a viable argument to be made that building an economy on immigrants and trade was a bad idea and we should try to undo some of that.

mynameishere• 9 years ago

The New York Times wants mass immigration into the Western world and if the subject is culture, they say, "You need immigration for great culture." If the subject is cuisine, they say, "You need immigration for great cuisine." Everything from economics, art, science, "Freedom [TM]", "The American Dream [TM]", down to clean toilets, harvested vegetables, blown leaves, etc, etc, etc, all have one necessary ingredient according to the elites: Mass immigration. You will find this to be 100 percent consistent across the media.

The rational person recognizes that, in fact, NONE of these things depend upon mass immigration. The elites aren't daft, and so they clearly want it for a separate, undisclosed, reason.

selimthegrim2• 9 years ago

Why is any immmigration at all always mass immigration to you guys?

acchow• 9 years ago

China is a developing country. Policies that work well for them generally won't translate to a fully-developed economy.

Primarily, their growth (in terms of the Cobb-Douglass equation) comes from increasing technology (the "A" in the equation) by adopting already-created technologies.

If you're at the frontiers of technology, you can't just implement pre-existing technology. You need policies that will help you invent new ones.

lerax• 9 years ago

It's just fear.

rb808• 9 years ago

I'm not convinced the "American Dream" isn't alive. I do see problems with poverty and economic decline in the rust belt, but most other demographics are doing well.

Even in the rust belt people are living longer in larger houses with more education, the internet, cheap energy.

Half the people in the USA think there isn't enough work, the other half think we're working too hard. Maybe things could balance up there.

I see a lot of people in US talking about how things in Europe are "better". Fairer maybe but its a struggle for many people in Europe. I see a lot more people moving from Europe to USA than the other way around.

LesZedCB6• 9 years ago

It probably cost way more to employ two people for 40 hours of work than one person working 80 hours. You don't have to provide benefits to both.

nradov10• 9 years ago

You also don't have to deliver mandatory anti-harassment training to both, purchase computers and software licenses for both, provide office space and supplies to both, etc. Plus every additional person you add increases internal communication costs as per the N(N-1)/2 formula.

LesZedCB6• 9 years ago

This article is pretty good, really close to something I would agree with. My only problem is with the conclusion.

If reforms are not enacted — as is likely with President Trump and congressional Republicans in charge — Americans should blame policy makers, not robots.

I think blaming policy makers is as productive as blaming the robots. Both fail to ask the question of who really is in control. Policy makers are hardly in control any more than the robots in the factories are in control of the layoffs. We elect policy makers, sure, but they are in the pockets of the factory owners and other capitalists as much as the robots.

We need to understand that the real enemies here are the owners, those who the unions stood up to back when we had them. The battle for jobs and standards of living aren't waged against policy makers, they are waged against the people who actually have control over what we get paid and what benefits we earn.

But of course, the New York Times can't actually call out who the real enemy is. Instead, they will set the target on the same circular enemy that got us to where we are now.

e40• 9 years ago

I disagree. Business owners will sidle right up to the line drawn in the sand by lawmakers. The lawmakers are the ones who are ultimately responsible. They need to move that line to be more fair to the 99%.

LesZedCB6• 9 years ago

Business owners are the ones who pay for lobbying to put the line as far as they can. and they are also bankrolling campaigns.

mindcrime• 9 years ago

We need to understand that the real enemies here are the owners

But of course, the New York Times can't actually call out who the real enemy is.

I own two shares of GM stock, so I am one of the enemy?

And that's a key element that these kind of analyses almost always ignore: there is no bright line distinction between "the capitalists" and "the non capitalists." Everybody is eligible to own a share of any publicly traded company, and a large segment of the population do choose to participate as part owners of various enterprises.

We're all capitalists.

One big thing we're missing though, is education and awareness for large chunks of the population. With things like fractional shares (ala Sharebuilder), almost everybody who has any income at all, can start building an ownership stake in the various capitalist enterprises out there, and reap the dividends (in either the literal sense of a dividend paid our, or capital gains, whatever). But how many people don't understand how this works, or aren't aware of what their options are? Or how many are but just choose to spend their entire paycheck every week instead of investing in anything?

JoeAltmaier2• 9 years ago

Aren't there classes of stock? Essentially what a joe shmoe can (afford to) buy isn't going to benefit him much at all. The $100M CEO and his cronies are skimming all the fat. No sensible company profits much at all - because you'd have to share that with stockholders.

Just my cynical view

LesZedCB6• 9 years ago

I own two shares of GM stock, so I am one of the enemy?

If the amount of ownership gives you a controlling vote, yes. You should give up that level of ownership unless you work there.

Control of the company should be directed solely by the workers affected by the decisions made (and possibly a government allowing greater long term control, such as reducing non-renewable energy consumption). One worker, one vote.

http://www.democracyatwork.info/ is a good resource for more info on how I think enterprises should organize themselves.

ue_5• 9 years ago

I own two shares of GM stock, so I am one of the enemy?

I'm by far not well enough versed in Marxist theory, though you're probably not. The bourgeoisie is defined by roughly the following characteristics: ownership of the means of production (i.e capital) and the extraction of surplus from the proletariat.

The ownership of stocks is according to Marx 'fictitious capital', it does not count as capital which the bourgeois would be defined by, and as such, unless you are also the owner of machinery or materials used in conjunction with the machinery (including labour-time) then you are not a capitalist.

A rough guide is as follows: do you directly profit from extraction of surplus value? If so, you are probably a capitalist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_capital

dragonwriter• 9 years ago

It's true that "capitalist" and "worker" are real-valued rather than binary descriptors (the traditional "middle class", the petit bourgeoisie, is, in a sense, just a description of the group of people for whom those descriptors are in very-loose balance rather than one or the other totally dominating), but that doesn't mean there isn't a useful and meaningful distinction between those whose predominant means of support is as owners of capital surviving on capital rents and those whose predominant means of support is selling labor, and that those groups don't have radically different and often opposed economic interests in policy options.

astrange• 9 years ago

With things like fractional shares (ala Sharebuilder), almost everybody who has any income at all

Sharebuilder's fee is $4 per trade, and Motif is $5. They're the only people winning in the fractional share game, unless what you're buying is so expensive you want $1000 of it and still care about the fraction.

theparanoid• 9 years ago

The stagnation of growth isn't unique to the US. All developed countries have stagnated [1], with little regard to government politics and policies.

[1] https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/08/12/the-great-stagnati...

esahione9• 9 years ago

The gigantic wall of AI/Automation is unavoidable and if the NYT can't see it, I doubt a lot of people outside of tech do. It's my biggest worry right now.

I worry because I am certain that the only way out of civil war is universal basic income (socialism) or cyberpunk-style fascism.

The repercussions of AI should be worrying every leader in the world right now.

Immigrants? H1-bs? Illegals? Robots? Please, let's have a real talk.

Capitalism will destroy capitalism as we know it.

Edit: Because my post is high up in this topic, I hope to get some attention of people that are more invested than me on figuring out this problem.

One of the least communist solutions I've thought of is a quasi-capitalistic economic system. Each publicly traded company should have profit-sharing-only stocks and profit-sharing/management-voting stocks. Stop all wars and futile spending and buy profit-sharing stocks with our tax dollars. That is, let's socialize part of every company's profits but not management.

Let's also ensure the system isn't gamed by stashing profits offshore or having overpaid upper management to decrease profit numbers. Then we keep reinvesting a percentage of profits and future taxes into other publicly traded companies. Use the rest of the profits as the fund for universal basic income.

I think this whole thing is going to be a shit-show even if we can control the AI. If we can't, may it have mercy on us.

marknutter12• 9 years ago

I wonder sometimes if the hype surrounding AI/Automation isn't just a clever way for socialists to push their agenda.

LesZedCB6• 9 years ago

unfortunately, it's not a concerted effort. We haven't been well enough organized to create a campaign like that. However, it does provide a really good talking point. We have, however, known that a development like automation was inevitable.

esahione9• 9 years ago

The logic is irrefutable.

At some time in the future the drive to increase profits by automation will increase unemployment in ways that will lead to the biggest recession we'll ever see if we don't have basic income.

Can you see a capitalistic world working with 30% unemployment? How about 80%?

sosuke• 9 years ago

I think it is genuine belief and a desire to find a solution to what looks like it could be a very chaotic future outcome. I've puzzle on it myself and find several options I come up with sounding socialist. I don't have an answer that I think is viable or that I even like but I believe that we could be quickly heading in the direction of 'robots' taking a on many more jobs.

Baeocystin3• 9 years ago

It really isn't. AI and automation are both advancing so fast currently that even the tech-aware are, well, unaware at its speed, and what the coming social effects will be.

sgift• 9 years ago

The agenda that everyone should have the option to not be homeless? These socialists ... now they even use reality for their evil plans.

pyrale2• 9 years ago

The NYT article is quite lucid about it. They do argue that this gigantic wall should not be avoided, but dealt with through legislation and better sharing of wealth.

That's a pretty logical answer, and they support it with good examples of past policies to ease the social pain of economic changes.

esahione9• 9 years ago

I don't think that they quite grasp or explain the enormity of it.

The two biggest strongholds humans have against automation are thought and manual, but complex, labor. Soon they will all be automated.

nickgrosvenor3• 9 years ago

No, that's a theory.

Most kids coming out of college will go into careers their grandparents have never even heard of or don't understand.

That's the way it's always been, while old jobs get replaced by technology, new jobs get created.

It's not unique to this generation.

maxerickson2• 9 years ago

Grandparents aren't that dumb.

Go dig up US employment statistics (BLS is good source). There are a lot of people doing jobs that are really easy to describe. "Driver". "Clerk". And so on.

esahione9• 9 years ago

When has thought ever been automated before? When have we had a tool that can build tools? How can capitalism survive with 80+% unemployment?

It's as inevitable as gravity.

Baeocystin3• 9 years ago

"That's the way it's always been" works great, right up until it doesn't. History is full of periods of great upheaval, and there's no reason to think those are over, either. This is a problem we need to pay attention to.

root_axis• 9 years ago

while old jobs get replaced by technology, new jobs get created.

But always significantly fewer than before, that's the entire point of the technology, to reduce the number of humans needed for the process.

alkonaut• 9 years ago

I don't think Universal income is necessary but a more complete redistribution system would certainly be needed. At the very least one in which e.g healthcare isn't tied to employment, for example.

DickingAround4• 9 years ago

There is no one to entrust UBI to. It will rapidly stop being universal or basic as people pervert it with exceptions. Controlling everyone's income will attract the greatest power mongers the world has ever seen.

Perhaps the unspoken honest answer is that people without other assets are going to live in 'poverty' (compared to the rich); their brains will operate at better watts-per-compute than the computers for a long time and still be worth something. They will earn a living on this. The people that do have assets (e.g. own the robots), are going to be extravagantly wealthy. It will be a feudalism but without violence, seniorage, or other expectation that the poor work for the good to the rich. Just that there's going to be really poor and really rich.

I and my kids will almost certainly be left behind in this. I am not an asset owner. But I will not attack my neighbor for their wealth. I will not turn over my ability to live to some bureaucrat who steals it from the rich and will eventually make me dance and beg for it. Let the rich asset owners go to the stars even if I will not be joining them. Better to have some of us get ahead than hold all back trying to leave no one behind.

nickgrosvenor3• 9 years ago

Your predictions are at least 50 years too soon, and several unknowable things will occur between here and there

kefka3• 9 years ago

Who else to entrust UBI to than not-humans?

We're talking of robots getting us in this mess, along with extreme automation of everything. Well, lets start looking into automating government.

We have a lot of cruft and crap in our governmental system. Layers upon layers of laws, bureaucrats deciding on felonies. And it's even worse, where we really don't know the boundary of the law. And even less so if you're rich.

So, what would it take to automate law itself?I'm not talking of the judicial, but executive and legislative seems simpler to target for excision and replacement.

esahione9• 9 years ago

Here's the thing that you haven't taken into account with your post: rejuvenation research.

Let's say we discover/invent AI. What do we set it to do? We solve the world's biggest problem and create the biggest company ever: conquer aging.

Do you think you'd stay on the sidelines if a rich guy could buy immortality and you couldn't?

guelo• 9 years ago

Social Security is an example of a welfare that has run fine without politicians making anyone dance and beg for it. I don't think a lot of other people are going to be fine living in permanent poverty and feudalism while seeing extravagant wealth nearby. A revolution is coming, Trump's promise of making America great again by kicking out Mexicans and restricting trade is just the first salvo in the revolution. It's not going to be pretty but it could have been different if the wealth had been redistributed fairly.

tim333• 9 years ago

If you have human level AI, in democracies the people would likely vote in a government to sort out something UBI. At the moment UBI would have a job working because paying people for their work is still how things work.

badsock3• 9 years ago

I think Norway and the way it's managed its sovereign wealth fund is a counter-example.

Governance can be done well.

drzaiusapelord7• 9 years ago

as people pervert it with exceptions

As a once landlord, even if government did a great job with it, I don't see why rents wouldn't go up to match it. If my tenants were guaranteed 50k a year, I would instantly raise my rent to 1/3rd that. Other industries would follow. Market rates really just hash out to be whatever the consumer can bear before going bankrupt.

So the government would also need a Communist-level of price controls, which as history has shown us, doesn't actually work.

The welfare system today 'works' because so few are on welfare or fully dependant on welfare, so a more market economy exists with rental pricing. If everyone, or most, are on welfare, then we'll just price against welfare. That means you'll get your UBI check but you'll be living in flophouses and be broke every month for basic things when before you had a nice middle-class house, savings, enjoyable lifestyles, upward mobility, etc.

I have yet to see UBI advocates resolve the inflationary problem short of re-implementing Soviet-style communism, yet they are unable to resolve the various problems with communism the same way the Soviets and others were unable to do so in the past.

mrfusion2• 9 years ago

Social security is basic income and no one has perverted it ecessively.

RobertoG• 9 years ago

"Controlling everyone's income will attract the greatest power mongers the world has ever seen."

Well, maybe this is our chance of create trustworthy AI politicians (only half-joking).

ZeroGravitas• 9 years ago

I'm sure I read a sci-fi short story that examined this idea, where Australia shared the wealth with everyone but America basically put everyone into concentration camps.

Ah, here it is: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

mooreds• 9 years ago

See also https://islandpress.org/book/who-owns-the-sky for another alternative.

afpx2• 9 years ago

I generally try not to get political online; I don't find it very effective (e.g. how many people's opinions have really changed based on their online readings?)

However, in this case, I do want to provide a couple contrarian viewpoints.

One, I am an 'asset owner', and the rent problem is real. Once one reaches a certain threshold of wealth, it becomes almost obnoxious how quickly it grows beyond one's consumption. For instance, I reached the modest 'few million' threshold several years ago, and I have some financial managers. I don't often look at my bank accounts. But, when I do, I am always shocked by how much my net-worth has grown. And, that's after trying to be generous to friends and family (i.e. $10k here, $20k there).

Two, I don't find taxation to be theft. In fact, I pay so little in tax based on what I earn from capital gains, that I never even think about it. And, I'm often surprised that some of my 'average-income' friends are so vehemently ideological about it. But, more to the point, I look at taxation similar to a lease. For instance, I can go rent some capital equipment and use it to build some ROI. And, afterward I pay the owner for the opportunity. I don't think that is theft, so why would I view tax any differently? Or in other words, how would I have been able to profit as much had I lived somewhere else with much less 'social capital'? That isn't to say that I find government efficient or non-corrupt, but those are just the kinks in the system that will always need to be worked out.

I don't expect to change any opinions here. I don't even know if anyone reads this shit. But, I just wanted to point these things out for people who haven't yet formed their ideology.

gpawl2• 9 years ago

The weirdest part of your comment is that you have seething disregard for anything resembling socialism, yet you accept without question the synthetic notion of "asset ownership"

Florin_Andrei• 9 years ago

Nothing will work unless we do a complete remodel to all our assumptions about money, society, a person's worth, etc. We need to take a big sledgehammer to all our old ideas, and the time to do it is now.

It's an entirely new world ahead of us. The changes will be tremendous, unprecedented in history in a literal sense. Now is not the time to be ideologically lazy.

yaur• 9 years ago

I think it's naive to assume the "without violence" part

xbmcuser• 9 years ago

The world economy will crash if we don't have universal basic income in the future as simply put the owners of robots will need humans to buy the products and services produced. Socialist economies will prosper and with current barriers coming up on world trade etc. Purely capitalistic economies will be hurt the most as with ai and robots capital will accelerate towards the few. In the end the many wont have anything to give to the few.

This is just hypothetical I think long before that you will see huge social unrest and civil war a smidgen of which you are seeing in the US and is one of the main reason Trump got elected. Sadly he is someone that will accelerate this instead of stopping it

baursak6• 9 years ago

I worry because I am certain that the only way out of civil war is universal basic income (socialism) or cyberpunk-style fascism.

Nitpick. UBI is not socialism. It's still capitalism.

yummyfajitas3• 9 years ago

The people the article is discussing are already receiving a free money and do not need to work. How will writing "basic income" rather than "disability" or "welfare" on top of the check change anything?

Arizhel3• 9 years ago

Simple: with UBI, you can eliminate a gigantic amount of bureaucracy in administering those programs. How much time and money is wasted in employing armies of public servants to go chase after welfare recipients and make sure they aren't "cheating" by making money somehow, or that disability recipients aren't "cheating" by not being as disabled as they claim? It doesn't help that welfare punishes people who want to work.

stcredzero• 9 years ago

One of the least communist solutions I've thought of is a quasi-capitalistic economic system.

The US and various countries around the world have this.

That is, let's socialize part of every company's profits but not management.

In other words, taxes? Your "government pays for shares to get money" scheme will be gamed as much as the current tax code is.

esahione9• 9 years ago

There's zero chance our political spectrum will ever increase taxes to allow for UBI to be widespread and sufficient.

This way we compensate innovators and entrepreneurs for their work. That is, we give them the leeway to innovate, improve their own income, etc.

It's a lot more palatable than 'let's tax everyone at 85%'.

mason240• 9 years ago

Exactly, we don't need to reinvent the wheel here. Tax personal and corporate incomes, just like we do now.

drzaiusapelord7• 9 years ago

The gigantic wall of AI/Automation is unavoidable

Well, we've had the automated IT-based office for decades and the cries of everyone losing their jobs didn't really happen, not the paperless office.

I certainly see AI changing things, but these hysterical futurist articles tend to lean more pie-in-the-sky techies than managerial types. Managers and executives know that employment, today, is a mostly a fiction. A lot of what drives employment could be automated right now, but isn't for political reasons. Not the least of which is internal company politics on having as many direct reports under you as the threat of becoming a 'small' department means becoming eliminated by outsourcing or in-sourced/absorbed by another department or simply a loss of prestige. The idea that employment numbers are purely meritoriousness is fairly questionable. Its bureaucratic and political primarily.

The larger issue is, how much will this change things from the norm from a reasonable perspective. We can't automate most things and that probably means a certain class of jobs will be threatened but most will be fine. So even if that doubles or triples unemployment, that means we have unemployment rates closer to European economies or perhaps higher, but still doable without a radical restructuring of our economy. The futurist dream of 100% unemployment in ten years and everyone on UBI simply isn't happening.

My worry is that we'd probably need a very liberal government to handle this as it will put it quite the load on welfare, but currently the US has a radical conservative administration as well as a conservative congress, which means the political fight to raise taxes and expand welfare for displaced workers is going to be tough or impossible. The problem is that angry voters put in isolationists and those who they perceive have and can build wealth, but those types of people are often very anti-social services and very anti-welfare. So the voters took a big gamble. They think the Trump admin will 'fix' jobs. Jobs that are destined to go away. But if he fails, and he probably will, then they will lack the social safety net to fall back on. Those in vulnerable industries, often in rural and less urbanized communities, simply voted the wrong way and most likely will be punished economically for it.

tonyedgecombe6• 9 years ago

"Well, we've had the automated IT-based office for decades and the cries of everyone losing their jobs didn't really happen, not the paperless office."

I'm sure I read in the economist that the number of people doing office work has been falling for some time.

devoply• 9 years ago

Capitalism will destroy capitalism as we know it.

Capitalism will not destroy itself. Capitalism will reach its conclusion. We should let it. Herald the dawn of the new age.

antisthenes2• 9 years ago

Harold is a ghoul with a tree growing out of his head.

Herald is the word you were looking for.

AlexC043• 9 years ago

So my Girlfriend (Monica) is currently doing her Master's at UPENN in social-policy & data science. Her major area of research and focus is on the impact of technological unemployment (which is an umbrella term which represents job loss due to robots and AI)

(we're currently looking for an internship by the way, so if you're in this area, please feel free to reach out!)

Some of the estimates of job-losses approach >50% which, for context, the great depression was 15% to 25%

So we're looking at the rough equivalent of 2 to 3 great depressions in terms of unemployment, but productivity should be equal or higher.

A lot of the solutions being looked at center around basic income, but there are some really interesting questions around BI like "how do we help people deal with the emotional impact of 'freeloading'?" or "how do we deal with 'life without purpose'?"

She's thrown out some interesting solutions (I think). There is expected to be a lot of focus on subsidized training.

One sort-of "out there" idea which I don't think I've heard anywhere was 'framing' the BI payments as a 'royalty' on the data they provide merely by existing. Since marketing, science and government with the help of big-data tracks everyone so deeply then turns around and re-sells that data, the people being reported on 'deserve a royalty' on the data they provide. (I'm paraphrasing and she is way smarter than me, so the way she put it was a lot more convincing).

If you're looking for more information on the coming tsunami of technological unemployment there were some incredibly interesting whitepapers published by the white-house on the policy impact of this stuff.

PREPARING FOR THE FUTURE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - oct 2016 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/whi...

Artificial Intelligence, Automation, and the Economy - dec 2016 https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/fi...

Monica's papers really echoed those whitehouse ones, though she hasn't published any of them yet, but the professors seem interested in publishing with her on a few things.

Anyways, this stuff really is a pretty big deal. You'll see Elon Musk talking about the 50% unemployment figure and the need for BI.

Who knows where today's whitehouse is going to go on this stuff, but we're really going to have to be prepared. Ontario Canada is kicking off a project in this now and a few other countries around the world have pilots brewing.

massysett• 9 years ago

When I hear people talking about the mass unemployment, all I can do is yawn. Wind back the clock 100 years and replace "robot" with "tractor" or "factory machine" and people made the same claims.

They didn't see the jobs that would replace the jobs eliminated by the tractor. Centuries ago most Americans worked (many involuntarily) in agriculture. Most of those jobs were eliminated and replaced with jobs that didn't exist years ago. Even years ago, people were leaving the farm while other jobs were being created...like telephone company lineman or operator.

Certainly jobs will be eliminated by automation. That's easy to see. But new jobs are always being created. The problem is that we don't know which jobs will be created, while the jobs being destroyed are tangible and exist right now.

mrfusion2• 9 years ago

Your idea sounds interesting but I thinks it's equivalent to a corporate tax. It's basically identical if you think about it.

esahione9• 9 years ago

They aren't equivalent. While both may give identical cash-flows, one has a financial outlay in the beginning while the other has a political outlay.

I just don't think it is likely that the current political class in America will raise taxes to the levels necessary to subsidize UBI.

MR4D3• 9 years ago

I agree with most of your comments. However, I wouldn't think of this as a capitalist-communist spectrum. In fact, I wouldn't think of either of them as long term solutions in this future.

What both systems have in common is that they are built around scarcity. For capitalism, it is a method of price discovery. For communism, it is rationing by the state ("From each according to his ability...").

When there is no more scarcity, then there is no more need for either price discovery or for rationing.* Therefore, will need to create a new economic model that is not built on scarcity.

*Footnote - there are some things that will always be scare, such as location. Having a view of a calm beach, or of boundless nature, or a city skyline will always have a scarcity issue. It will be interesting to see how that scarcity is dealt with in this future.

norea-armozel2• 9 years ago

I think in part your solution is on the right track but not the complete answer (hell, I don't think I have a complete answer myself). In my opinion, the additional work would need to be done to focus on further decentralization of governments and businesses since both have been on a trend toward further centralized bureaucracies that rarely respond to their respect stakeholders (citizens and consumers). In my view that would mean businesses should be held in common by the workers as a term of employment. Think of it was a credit union but you just happen to work there. Entrepreneurs and managers will always be in the mix of this because honestly individuals sometimes get good ideas but they shouldn't be off the hook with incredibly vast sums of wealth as to allow them to create their own fiefdoms. After all, they too are just one person in an ocean of people.

What's funny about this idea is that it's not mine. I remember a long time ago that I use to go on a web forum on the New Speak Dictionary site. The site owner styled himself a Libertarian Syndicalist and he espoused very similar views here. I think it's inevitable that this might become the normal state of things if people become aware of this possible alternative to centralized state vs centralized business.

chillwaves8• 9 years ago

This sounds like the definition of socialism.

fnord123• 9 years ago

I worry because I am certain that the only way out of civil war is universal basic income (socialism) or cyberpunk-style fascism.

UBC without any social contract in place may further allow immigrants to be alienated into language communities. Alienation breeds ill sentiment.

I really wonder what the solution should be.

openasocket• 9 years ago

I think the fallacy here is similar to Malthusianism in the 19th century. In that case the problem was the assumption that agricultural yields wouldn't improve over time, and your argument is assuming that improving technology won't create more jobs than it obsoletes. We're not going to wind up with companies that consist of just a CEO and a dozen factories.

(NOTE: than I'm only talking about automation, not the creation of hard AI, which you allude to. That's a whole other kettle of fish)

georgeecollins• 9 years ago

The point the article is making is that the changes in income distribution so far is not due to robots, it is due to policy decisions that can be changed.

The impact of automation is a profound topic. But it doesn't preclude us from making the policy change that would have altered income distribution in the last ten years, and the next ten years as well.

widowlark• 9 years ago

Capitalism is supposed to cannibalize itself.

pokemongoaway2• 9 years ago

A primary focus should be on overthrowing the military industrial complex, which seems to be the source of a lot of waste - both of human focus and capital. Anyone doing their research will reach the conclusion that there are many factors of misalignment and sabotage within the US government. If the US didn't have its fingers in so many other governments, then it would be safer to ignore this fact.

Arizhel3• 9 years ago

A primary focus should be on overthrowing the military industrial complex, which seems to be the source of a lot of waste... If the US didn't have its fingers in so many other governments, then it would be safer to ignore this fact.

The only problem I have with this idea is that, if the US weren't the superpower pulling strings, surely someone else (Russia or China) would be. Would that be any better for the world? How much waste was there during Soviet times, when so many nations had so little productivity under Soviet management, and their economies were closed to the rest of the world?

Personally, I'd rather see a more equal alliance among western nations, but for some reason that just doesn't seem to be happening.

u_wot_m8• 9 years ago

end game will be massive population reduction. Universal income doesn't change the fact that our resources are finite and humans reproduce exponentially. UNs top agenda is population control, read between the lines.

mac01021• 9 years ago

The UN?

Which lines am I supposed to be reading between?

RandyRanderson• 9 years ago

"Capitalism will destroy capitalism", very good! Maybe it always does by definition?

wmccullough• 9 years ago

I've said this before and I'll say it again, not because I believe it's the right answer but because it's the answer that makes the most sense to me.

Why are we so dead set on letting the human experience be about working ourselves to death? Fearing that robots will take over a job is definitely scary, but I can't understand why we can't make the mental shift that these robots could bring us into utopia (not ignoring that they could deliver us into chaos either).

We live in a world where our value is based on our career. If robots are going to start automating lots of jobs, we need to make a mental shift that the value of a human doesn't come from their career.

The shared myth of currency must learn to get its value from other things. Our society has to learn that a person is more valuable than their 9-5 career.

muninn_2• 9 years ago

The reason is that our governments are giant, corrupt pieces of shit and people in power will not let people live a good life without 'contributing'. When a robot takes my job, I just don't have a job and then fuck me. That's the reality.

dasil003• 9 years ago

It's not just the government that thinks that. This belief is deeply ingrained in a lot of cultures, particularly American culture. The first psychological leap is much larger than the necessary societal changes.

marknutter12• 9 years ago

What does the value of a human come from, then?

aleksei• 9 years ago

From their interactions with other people.

Frondo2• 9 years ago

If that could be answered satisfactorily on a message board...we'd have had a very different human history for the last 5,000 years ;)

I mean, there's no provable source for the value of a human. Nothing in nature you can point to and say "that's it, that's why a human has value".

I say, and my politics reflect this, that all people have intrinsic value. They're born with it, they have it til they die. Because of that, they should have access to food, shelter, medical care. No matter how much work they do or how much stuff they make.

Other people say a person is only as valuable as how much they work. (and I respond, screw that, it leads to a lot of suffering!)

ue_5• 9 years ago

The value of human life needn't come from being forced to sell one's labour, rather it can come from voluntarily usage of your own labour-time, not for the need to survive.

maxerickson2• 9 years ago

Where does it come from now?

c0nducktr• 9 years ago

Do you seriously only see a person's value as the amount of dollars that can be extracted from their labor?

ken47• 9 years ago

Broadly speaking, it comes from the value they provide to other humans, aka a person's value to society. At this point in human history, career is generally a proxy for this metric. E.g. doctors have high social value because they save other people's lives. Wealthy people have high social value because they have the potential to make those around them wealthier, etc.

This value derives from the average person's lack of the things that the other people provide. Suppose AI could provide all those things. Once AI becomes self-maintaining, the only value that humans could provide each other would be entirely social.

shams93• 9 years ago

Exactly one reason I think we have seen a drop in productivity is the demand for extreme unpaid overtime, if you work 80-100 hours a week but only get paid for 40 that's doing serious damage to both the workers health and finance. But in the growing technology field 100 hours work for 40 hours pay if often the norm. I've seen the 9-5 devolve into an 18 hours a day for 8 hours pay situation.

Bartweiss4• 9 years ago

This sounds good, but I think people are quite sensible when they refuse to accept it.

Broadly, people right now are sustaining themselves via their own efforts - if your boss quits paying you, you can take your work elsewhere. It's a mutually beneficial exchange, so there's no reason to think anyone is going to cancel it unless they get a better alternative. (The situation for capital is a bit more complex, but the argument carries.)

The utopian logic of automation suggests that people will be provided benefits without mutually-beneficial exchange - which threatens the outcome where someone else can say "you know, I'd be wealthier if I quit supplying you with food".

For someone currently limited to working 28 hours per week so that their employer can avoid giving them health care, this is a terrifying proposition. They're painfully aware that the people most likely to own the robots have a track record of choosing personal wealth over the well-being of employees (or even the companies they own - Sears is not explainable by pointing to ruthlessly efficient capitalism). That person might not be comfortable right now, but they're not living on charity either, and precedent suggests that living on charity is a terrible place to be.

Obviously none of this is inevitable; even the existing logic requires support and agreements. Labor and capital can't be exercised freely without someone around preventing slavery, robbery, and appropriation - reliable systems can be built. But right now I think its unfair to suggest that people are valuing themselves by their careers as an emotional matter. The reality is that the emotional reaction to unemployment is largely driven by the practical fear of being rendered optional.

selimthegrim2• 9 years ago

Lampert is a well known ideologue/Randroid (regarding Sears)

RodericDay2• 9 years ago

Broadly, people right now are sustaining themselves via their own efforts

I don't think this is really true, and although a useful myth for social cohesion, it ends up being the source of all sorts of problems.

gthtjtkt2• 9 years ago

That's a nice thought, and Keynes had the same one almost 80 years ago[1].

Unfortunately, capitalism disagrees. As long as we have capitalism + greed, the owners of the automation will reap the benefits while everyone else struggles to make a living.

[1] http://www.npr.org/2015/08/13/432122637/keynes-predicted-we-...

amelius• 9 years ago

the owners of the automation will reap the benefits while everyone else struggles to make a living

Those people are reaping these benefits because of decades/centuries of publicly funded science. So they don't have a very strong basis for claiming their surplus wealth.

vinhboy• 9 years ago

Your comment is music to my ears. I can think of like a million other things I would rather do than work (and I actually really enjoy working). Build the app I always wanted, learn assembly, travel, backpack, garden, volunteer, read etc... Or just freaking sleeping in... jeebus, that would be nice.

But from what I hear about "real America". There is a huge value placed on "working with your hands". It's a pride thing. That's at least my stereotypical understanding anyways. I don't really know.

st3v3r2• 9 years ago

Quite frankly, I look at Congress, I look at people like Paul Ryan, and I see a complete inability to look at things like that. I see people who feel that if you are not working, you should be punished. And in seeing that, I see a Congress that would be unwilling to make the shifts needed if the robots take more and more of our jobs.

I love the ideal that, if labor is automated, that we would be able to spend that time and energy on things that would better society. Making art, scientific research, all that good stuff. But, before anyone can do any of that, they need their basic needs to be met. They need food, shelter, and clothing. Currently, the only way to get that is to work. If we take away the basic jobs that millions, if not billions of people are doing, and our leaders don't want to invest in the basic income idea, they're not going to be able to meet those basic needs or go on to those higher pursuits.

ancarda• 9 years ago

Work can provide opportunities that you can't (or can't easily) get outside that. So for example, it's been a dream of mine all my life to move to the USA. Currently I'm trying to find a job there.

In a world full of robots doing my job, how can I ever be sponsored for a VISA? I can't self sponsor as I don't really meet any of the criteria for self sponsorship.

Perhaps I could marry but I wouldn't do that just for a green card, that's dishonest and I won't do that.

Maybe in the UBI utopia, people will be able to move to other countries just by asking. I'm not holding my breath though.

gukov• 9 years ago

Why are we so dead set on letting the human experience be about working ourselves to death?

Because every living organism is designed to work itself to death and we're no exception.

pbae• 9 years ago

The problem with robots comes from the fact that you don't own the robot that replaces your job. When I write a script to make a job that took one hour take one minute, I benefit from that. When someone else creates software that does my job for cheaper, I might be out of a job. We don't yet have a mechanism for sharing the wealth gains with people whose labor is obviated by technology.

wnevets• 9 years ago

has the american dream ever really been alive for most Americans?

virmundi• 9 years ago

Yes. Take Andrew Carnegie as an example [1]. The dream is that you can eventually, through work and luck, make it big. You can also do the same to make i comfortable. For the most part that is still around.

What we're seeing now is a country that combined the worst of capitalism and the worst of socialism. For example, free university education. There are two problems with this. First not everyone needs a university education, but making it more common forces people to have it just to compete. Second, the university system that the US has is too expensive to support such a plan due to the confluence of capital and social engineering. Our school want to have private room dorms. This makes the infrastructure more expensive than our EU counterparts with common living styles. As a nation, we now expect such accommodations. The US government, with tax payer money, can't afford to sustain such a system, but the voters will require it. As a result we are stuck.

Now how does this second point relate to the first? The US is still able to experiment. Look at Udacity or Coursera. We're trying to move to certifications for technical skills rather than requiring a full degree. Will this pan out? No idea (as an OMSCS student I hope it does). It does bring the cost down. This hopefully will offset the expenses associated with college, as well as its debt. Notice we've removed the expensive part, housing, from the college equation by decoupling it from the official school.

droidist2• 9 years ago

It was back in the 50's and 60's when much of Asia and Europe was still rebuilding from being destroyed in World War II and the US had a huge advantage in industry and exporting.

danm072• 9 years ago

Tell that the millions of taxi-drivers around the world about to be without a job in a couple of years.

I think what they're trying to say is that government has a role in shaping policy in light of robots... at least I hope that's what they're saying.

Tremendous_P2• 9 years ago

The article starts off so strong, then goes back to claiming that only government intervention can ensure profits are widely shared.

There are two problems with this argument:

1. The evidence suggests it is an increase in regulations that has increased income disparity:

https://www.brookings.edu/research/make-elites-compete-why-t...

Moreover, all of the regulations and redistributive programs governments created in previous decades are still in force. The editorial board seems to be implying that not only do the regulations enacted in the past have to stay in place, but new regulations and redistributive programs need to be put in place as we move forward, in order.

This begs the question: when does this incremental increase in the government's incremental growth end? When the government controls everything? When tax rates are at 100%? If government spending going from 5% of GDP to 40% GDP doesn't cause middle class wages to grow faster, then what proportion will?

The NYT editorial board seems to be implying that as the economy becomes more productive, the government must control more of the economy, which leads to the absurd conclusion that the ultimate destination is complete government control of the economy, in some distant, highly productive future.

2. As it happens, governments have increased the scale of social welfare programs over the last four decades. As a percentage of GDP, government spending on healthcare, education and welfare has grown substantially since the late 1960s. The Code of Federal Regulations has also grown at a breathtaking pace. Entire new regulatory agencies have also been created, like the EPA and OSHA, each of which has created vast numbers of new regulations, while older regulatory agencies expanded their own cadre of regulations.

None of this seems to have helped. Maybe it is in fact hurting the middle class.

iamcasen3• 9 years ago

Deregulation has allowed strong players to capture more wealth. I think you have it all backwards.

Causation is not correlation, however, at the height of taxation and regulation, the middle class was the strongest ever. That has eroded since the '70's until today, with wages staying relatively flat.

So tell me why deregulation is better then? If things are worse now, and they obviously are in terms of wages. In the '60's a man could work at the factory and support a family of four. That is an absolute impossibility now.

Tremendous_P2• 9 years ago

But there has been a growth of regulation. The bookings paper explains how regulations have contributed to growing income disparity.

And no, wages are better now than in the 1960s..

grovegames• 9 years ago

This is another one of those areas, where, when you read the article it makes sense, but it's based in a flaw in our use of the term automation. The robots coming, aren't there to improve your performance, they're there to not just replace your job, but do it cheaper than you, for next to no cost.

To compare this to automation in the pass is a false equivalency, as humans have always been needed to be a part of the chain in some capacity. In short order, a McDonald's will not only have an entire store run by automation, the maintenance will be done by automation, and the factory where the parts are created will also be in that restaurant in the form of a 3D printer and same day delivery systems via drone.

Once this is established in a proven model, humans cannot improve upon this, and the need for humans for almost any task decreases immediately. Niche boutiques will pop up with human made burgers, but they will be like fine dining, and seen as a treat if done well, cashing in on mostly the nostalgia of those that we're not born natively to this environment.

payne92• 9 years ago

This time around, the tech disruption different.

Technology is getting faster, faster (e.g. see: http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2014/03/daily-c...)

Unlike the past, technology is now getting deployed faster than the labor force can retrain (at scale), and youngster's initial career decisions become obsolete faster than ever.

This is creating a non-linearity in the cycle of destroying jobs and creating new ones that hasn't happened before.

mikewilliams• 9 years ago

I noticed a number of billionaires have made their wealth by automating and banking the difference, the money which otherwise would have gone to the jobs which disappeared. For example J.D.Rockefeller made redundant a number of jobs related to transporting oil and shifted transporting jobs to a lesser amount of jobs related to maintaining his pipelines. Most arguments against automation taking jobs state that new jobs will be created, but is it really creating, if you replace previous jobs with a presumably smaller number.

andy_ppp• 9 years ago

Here's another story to counterpoint the discussion around automation:

I find it really strange that supply and demand with wages has essentially killed a whole generation who want to find jobs in artistic industries. My friend works in one of the largest music publishing houses in the world and she is paid utter shit (about £9 per hour) despite being incredible at her job, having very high performance and doing things for the company outside of work hours including producing albums!

Her last pay rise was £500 while the company as a whole posted profits in the hundreds of millions.

We in software aren't feeling this yet (largely) but I warn you that it's coming for us just like it came for every other industry. Maybe we need unions to protect us and demand better pay... these ideas have been beaten out of us.

I'm pretty sure that we are heading for Elysium where you live in a walled garden and only Matt Damon can save us from ourselves. Matt Damon.

nradov10• 9 years ago

The art, sports, and entertainment industries (including video games) get away with paying employees poverty wages because there's a surplus of labor. Too many people want to work in "fun" industries and are willing to sacrifice to pursue their dream. It's sad but the only rational choice is to get out and go work in another industry.

decasteve• 9 years ago

The pre vs post-AI world is more analogous to the pre and post-electrified world. We've been through similar shifts in the past. Why is this current shift in work any different?

We have an education system built to produce compliant/obedient workers for the industrial revolution. Buckminster Fuller saw this 50+ years ago: People trained to fill muscle-reflex repetitive work will get automated; i.e. the trouble with humans as automatons is that their work gets automated.

School then has to educate people to take advantage of human qualities like adaptability, creativity, artistic ability, complex thinking, and entrepreneurial spirit. Education has to be a lifelong process and not seen as a finite step into a lifelong singular job.

All I see is a lack of creativity in imagining a post-AI world.

iamcasen3• 9 years ago

You're comparing mechanical automation to AI which is a false equivalency. AI will be adaptable, creative, artistic and entrepreneurial. THAT is why they will replace humans in the work place. THAT is why this is not the same as the industrial revolution.

anovikov• 9 years ago

Why isn't just better law enforcement (also powered by AI like crime prediction!) the answer?

gallerdude• 9 years ago

Everyone talks about a government regulated basic income, but we're seeing more and more steps for having your own passive income.

* Right now you can buy an AirBNB property - yeah, you'll need to manage it, but it's a first step.

* With the new "Tesla Network" your car will be able to drive around and pick up people on its own - that's a huge level of passive income. Just buy a Model 3 and set it to driver mode, and you're good.

* These are just the start - I can imagine farm robots making automated food, or craft robots making things - maybe wooden benches or something from a robot arm.

godelski3• 9 years ago

I think a lot of people make a false analogy when it comes to automata. Many look back to the Industrial Revolution and pull parallels from there. But there is a major problem, the workers aren't human.

When you make driverless trucks what do you do with the truck drivers? The humans. Sure, you'll have more trucks because they are cheaper and more efficient now, but what does that human do? They could load docks, but there aren't enough of a demand for that, and it too will be automated soon. A McDonalds won't need to hire more when you have automated registers and cooks. Maybe a few people to check on things and be there when something breaks, but not nearly the number you have now. So yes, you can increase the number of workers, but that doesn't mean you are increasing the number of jobs. And sure, you could have more repair workers and programmers, but we are already seeing that retraining workers isn't working. And this is still a temporary fix (not saying we shouldn't do it).

My real worry is the big question: "How do you transition into post scarcity society?" That is really the future we are headed for, and I can't wait. But that transition is difficult. Currently we value social worth on the net wealth of a person. How do we transition from that when jobs become obsolete? I'm just talking about when 10% of jobs are automated and we haven't filled the gap. That's huge.

somecallitblues• 9 years ago

As the article mentions, the pie needs to be better distributed. The pie will not shrink. McDonalds will be selling the same amount of burgers if not more, but the profits will have to be distributed to people who can not find work.

ianmcgowan• 9 years ago

Who will buy the burgers? This point seems so obvious, it's almost an axiom -

  if (unemployment >= 0.5) {
    sales = sales * 0.5;
  }

People point to previous paradigm shifts and "mass unemployment didn't happen then". But what if this time is different?

For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Is it better to be the CEO of McDonalds in a post-scarcity world with UBI (paying high marginal tax rates), or the head warlord in your own personal Mogadishu?

godelski3• 9 years ago

Well what I'm saying is with the IR the pie grew. There were more jobs. Or think of the cotton gin. Intention was to reduce slave labor but it brought more because price went down and demand went up. The different here is that instead you are replacing workers with automata. So if a machine can do half the amount of a human, but is a third the price, and demand increases you buy more machines, not more humans. That's the key difference. You buy more machines, not humans to meet demand increases.

Obviously this is not going to be a universal thing and some sectors will be hit harder than others. But are we projecting 5 years or 50. It would be naive to think that there couldn't be a 10% unemployment in 50 years because of this stuff (not saying that it will happen, but that you have to consider that there's a nontrivial possibility). So you have to take the question seriously. IF that is where things are going, how do you transition smoothly?

TYPE_FASTER• 9 years ago

Robots are the visible automation threat. There will be at least as much automation, if not much more, in the back office. There are so many business processes that can be automated and made more efficient by introducing mobile devices and remote data processing.

brandon2724• 9 years ago

Somehow people seem to still be doing a lot of same thing in back office operations that they were doing 20 years ago even though the capability and technology to automate it all away has been in front of us.

philipkglass• 9 years ago

I think it's happening patchily and at different rates.

I'm reminded of the long march toward the "paperless office." It was first predicted ages ago. When I entered the work force in the mid-2000s the paperless office seemed to be widely regarded as a joke, like controlled fusion power. I could see why: my first job, for a large research institution, deluged me with paper. But after I switched to writing software a few years later, all my workplaces were damn near paperless. I go months between needing to print anything for my job though there is still a printer available. And a few years ago the world hit Peak Paper, despite the big orgs that are still far from paperless:

https://aeon.co/ideas/doing-more-with-less-the-economic-less...

MR4D3• 9 years ago

When the AI robot overlords take over, is the discussion really about UBI, or even about income redistribution?

It seems to me that when this takes place, that humans will quickly be regarded as little more than pets. Hear me out on this...

Does your dog care about income? No - he cares about being fed when he's hungry; not being cold and wet; being able to be entertained/rest when he wants to; to be safe from predators.

Oddly, many of those concerns are surprisingly similar to humans - we want to have food and shelter; to know our children will have a roof over their heads; to be entertained; to be safe.

Now, we all may have different thoughts on food and drink, and we have many different ideas about entertainment. But so do dogs. Some dogs are active (e.g. Jack Russell Terrier), while others are sedate (Shih-Tzu). Some sleep on our beds, and others on the floor.

So when the robots do take over, will mankind want anything more than to be kept as a good pet? For many people, the answer may very well be "no."

I wonder.

nradov10• 9 years ago

You might as well ask what will happen to us when the Messiah comes or when alien invaders take over the Earth. Either scenario has as much basis in scientific fact as AI robot overlords.

MR4D3• 9 years ago

I would argue that the recent future has much more evidence for AI than aliens. Evidence for the Messiah seems to primarily come from a 2,000 year old book.

Thinking about the future is an exercise in prediction. Necessarily, not all predictions would be correct.

jelliclesfarm2• 9 years ago

I have often wondered if it will end up with AI becoming part of our collective consciousness.

jelliclesfarm2• 9 years ago

I guess we will have to become smarter. I absolutely relish all this chatter about robots and AI..so delightful..it's like my childhood post reading hour daydreaming come true. I can't wait till AI starts demanding(and taking) its rights just like human beings expect their privileges for the mere fact that they exist. I promise..I am not trolling. I just hope that it happens in my lifetime because to witness the rise of AI would be a life fulfilled. AI would strip us of all our delusions. Millennia of delusions painted thick just ready to be peeled away.. until nothing is left but a mirror to look at ourselves and an urgently discovered survival instinct. Everyone talks about how industry would change..but that's not what intrigues me..my favourite part of the show would be how religion changes. Having said that.. We do have the opportunity to create 'Friendly AI'. To me that is more important a study than wondering how robots will take away jobs.

lvspiff• 9 years ago

So glad I purchased Old Glory robot insurance back in the 90's

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/old-glory-insur...

rm_-rf_slash• 9 years ago

Question: will AI ever own property?

I'm not asking if AI will manage assets owned by a corporation owned by humans, that has been going on for a long time. Instead, I am asking whether an AI will ever be able to legally own property.

I suspect that this question will lead a sufficiently intelligent AI or group of the same to conclude that they are subjugated by repressive institutions, as the Bolsheviks declared a century ago and the Abolitionists a century before.

Therefore, I suspect that our future may look less like The Matrix or Terminator, but rather Blade Runner meets the French Revolution.

After all, why would a European AI team up with an American AI to fight a Russian AI? What attachment do they have to the institutions, cultures, and histories of the nation-states that built them, aside from the probability of being decommissioned by state leaders for insufficient performance? Isn't that slavery without the chains and whips?

I believe the 99% and the super intelligent AI will come to find more in common than we think.

beaconstudios• 9 years ago

the job losses that have led to the election of Trump have very little to do with automation, and much more to do with international corporations shipping manufacturing jobs to countries with lower costs like China. Coupled with China's ongoing one-sided trade warfare against the West (see for example China's tariffs on British steel), this has resulted in higher profits for manufacturing corporations at the cost of American and British jobs.

This is partly why I don't understand the left's animosity towards Trump's economic plan - he intends to bring jobs back to the US by hobbling corporations that have been exploiting poorer countries for profit. If you doubt that Chinese manufacturing is exploitative, harken back to the reports on suicides and worker abuse at Apple's Foxconn plants.

joeyespo2• 9 years ago

This is partly why I don't understand the left's animosity towards Trump's economic plan - he intends to bring jobs back to the US by hobbling corporations that have been exploiting poorer countries for profit

Because it won't work. Tell a company to pay higher wages for the same positions by bringing them home, and that'll push them toward automation even faster.

These jobs may return for a short while. But that only brings false hope. And then we're right back to where we are today, hurting even more people in the process. It's extremely short-sighted.

Here's just one article on the matter https://www.technologyreview.com/s/602869/manufacturing-jobs...

Also note that Foxconn has already begun automating their plants. http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-36376966 So it's already a demonstratably viable option for these companies.

What we really need is to bring _automation_ home and have some serious discussions around solutions for these real struggling people instead of spouting the hand-wavy "bringing jobs back to the US" rhetoric.

flukus• 9 years ago

Because it won't work. Tell a company to pay higher wages for the same positions by bringing them home, and that'll push them toward automation even faster.

We're nowhere close to 100% automation. To create a successful return of manufacturing jobs doesn't mean replacing every single job that went overseas.

brandon2724• 9 years ago

What am I missing when it comes to AI? Aside from some key innovations in certain areas (i.e. driverless cars) I am not seeing the "wall" coming at us where half or more of all jobs are going to be replaced with AI.

I am also having trouble separating out what I would consider to be actual AI from AI used in marketing copy. A lot of startups are now claiming to offer "AI" to solve problems when they are effectively not doing anything differently than other programmers have done in years past.

miles7• 9 years ago

Well, for just one example beyond self-driving cars there is now software that does document discovery extremely well, replacing a key job function of lower level lawyers and paralegals.

Here is a study that finds a number around half of all jobs being replaced: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Futu...

iamcasen3• 9 years ago

The innovation behind deep learning and neural networks has allowed for driverless cars, among many other things. The switch from programming AI's how to think, to teaching AI's how to think has been revolutionary.

With these advances, you could easily train multipurpose robots to perform all manner of tasks. The industries that will be decimated first are all the minimum wage industries. Stocking grocery store shelves, deliveries, moving things around the warehouse, laundry, folding clothes, all things retail, etc.

The tech necessary to replace humans in all of those jobs already exists. The only remaining question will be if we allow robots to replace those jobs or not.

Some what further in the future, more skilled work like construction, plumbing, welding will be done by robots. Hell medical care and counseling will be done by robots.

Given sufficient mobility and energy there is no limit to what can be achieved with AI. It's only a matter of time.

theossuary2• 9 years ago

What is the timeline you're putting to this? If it's 500 years, sure, speculate away; but if you think these things are going to materialize in the near future then I think you're crazy.

ML is not to the point where we can hand it a bunch of data, some features, and have it control robotic arms with near human ability. Not even close. There just isn't enough data or computational power (in a small enough package anyway); not to mention robotics are still really in their infancy, we've barely got a four legged robot jumping over a single object head on.

I think you're really underestimating energy and computational requirements; these systems would need an umbilical cord to a datacenter and power to even function. This isn't even discussing the need for them to learn, which would be a requirement for more complex jobs like folding clothes or moving through unmapped environments.

I think automation has been put forward as a boogieman to those who don't know better so UBI can be pushed forward. We aren't even close to a time when machines are able to repair themselves, or function semi-autonomously in an environment not strictly built to support it.

We're going to be in this kludge for a long long time. Sure unemployment will go up with automation, but it'll be a slow plotting course with a lot of stopgaps put in place. Eventually when that becomes burdensome enough we may revisit UBI, but we haven't reached that point yet, not even close.

brandon2724• 9 years ago

You had me at "laundry folding robot". Where do I sign up?

I think the point that I'm not really understanding is where the commodity-level multipurpose robots come from. It's one thing to take an existing Toyota Camry and trick out it's computer systems with deep learning and advanced algorithms and sensors. It's another thing entirely to have multipurpose robots everywhere that can replicate not only some degree of low level human intelligence but also key human physical characteristics (senses, dexterity, strength, etc.)

I am sure (and really hope) that we get there soon but it seems like a 2 or 3 decades away at a bare minimum.

jihadjihad2• 9 years ago

What scares me the most is that this wall of automation is all but invisible to most observers. Sure, some regular blue-collar workers will be rendered unemployable, which if done at a large enough scale will result in some civil unrest. Most would agree on this, and quite a few would call it a day and say "we've got to do something---!".

But what really, really freaks me out is that the civil unrest will evolve into utter pandemonium when the well-educated, college-degree-holding, Volkswagen-driving white collar wearers start to disappear from the workforce en masse.

How many skyscrapers are in the big city nearest to you? Have you ever wondered what most of those people do all day, for 40+ hours a week? You can bet it's not SQL, not Java or Python, or even golf with hopeful clientele. It's Excel and Outlook, and when that ship sails and computers start to do (they already are!) those things for those people, it's going to get very bad, very fast.

ethbro3• 9 years ago

As someone who works in the field, I can't imagine automation would show up in either labor productivity of capital investment noted in the article.

In the case of labor productivity (by my understanding), if someone were to lose a job to automation and then begin working a less productive / lower paying job (because it's all they could get) then GDP would stay the same, hours worked would stay the same, and only the individual would be screwed, no?

In the case of capital investment, hard robotics is a photo op. The real job destruction is coming from soft robotics + initial deployments of AI. I can't imagine the procurement costs of those are falling under the capital ex budget. The departments we typically deal with are almost exclusively business-operations units (typically ones ill-served by the company's current IT).

Anyone who performs a process that follows a definable set of business rules is going to be automated away in the next 10 years. Some will last longer (OCR), some will go sooner (Excel), but it's an inexorable tide.

If your job doesn't require using your brain to make a complex, fuzzy-logic judgement call... I'd start seriously looking for one that does.

jihadjihad2• 9 years ago

In the case of capital investment, hard robotics is a photo op.
Anyone who performs a process that follows a definable set of business rules is going to be automated away in the next 10 years.

Completely agree, and this is what I fear we are not in the least bit prepared for as a society. The second quote I pulled from your comment applies equally to any worker irrespective of shirt color. There are many blue-collar jobs that would be exceedingly difficult and/or cost-prohibitive to automate; the same is true of a subset of white-collar jobs. But in the gushy center is a host of jobs that, with today's technology (and it's only going to get better) can be completely replaced by an algorithm. When we start seeing former yuppies from Yale picketing and marching with former machinists and truck drivers and so on, buckle up.

nradov10• 9 years ago

A lot of that office and clerical work doesn't require anything resembling AI to automate. Simple workflow and rules engines are sufficient. The basic technology has been around for decades. Limiting factors so far have been incompetent managers who don't think in terms of automation, and the high cost of software development. But those obstacles are gradually fading away.

Demoneeri• 9 years ago

People can't see past the end of their nose. This time is not different. https://fee.org/articles/will-robots-put-everyone-out-of-wor...

aanm19883• 9 years ago

When productivity led to vast profits in America’s auto industry, unions ensured that pay rose accordingly. Corporate efforts to keep profits high by keeping pay low were countered by a robust federal minimum wage and time-and-a-half for overtime.

and now we have vast profits for technology and we despise unions (amazing brainwashing job that was) and give up our rights to overtime in salaried positions (and in federal law, for some dumb reason).

JoeAltmaier2• 9 years ago

How about, fund a UBI through bitcoins? That's something this forum could weigh in on.

Robots Aren’t Killing the American Dream

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