Better hot rolling mills have been mechanized for a long time. Here's a plain rebar mill in Delhi that's for sale.[1] There must be some people around somewhere, but they're not near the machinery when it's working. The machinery is huge, but not computerized. On the other hand, here's a rolling mill in India that has lots of people handling hot metal with tongs.[2] That's about where the US was in 1935.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eW0jAMxAN3Y [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-lGaC8OJGs

[1] http://timkovach.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/clark-ave...

(For those of you who don't know what this is, each electrode is a graphite column one or two feet in diameter and about 20 feet long. Replacing them took two guys, selected for their resemblance to linebackers, and had to be done multiple times each day.)

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9zW4BcomQo

"While about 300 other workers in Donawitz carry out support roles such as shipping logistics and running the internal rail system, the rolling mill itself will be operated by just over a dozen people."

The plant also needs people working on product development (e.g. different wire materials and weights), process development (improvement in capacity to over name place capacity), health and safety (even with a hands-free plant like this there are plenty off hazards and a large amount of environmental and H&S compliance work), and so on. All these people need managers. And then there is demand management - figuring out what to make and when, goods inwards (and its quality control), dispatch and managing all the associated paperwork and QC.

And there need to be people who make are those controlling computers and all the transmitters and controllers are working properly.

and so on. But a laudable achievement nonetheless.

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.

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.

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.

That said, the Culture does seem like it would be a nice place to live, over all.

Banks himself was distinctly anti-capitalist.

':-|

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.

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

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.

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?

Get a pet.

- Party A's candidate is clean and runs on improving infrastructure but that requires a slight cut to UBI

- Party B's candidate has issues regarding corruption, doesn't talk much about infrastructure but promises an increase to the UBI stipend

Which candidate do you think people will vote for?

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.

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.

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.

(Which is why politicians are so busy denying that anyone will lose coverage under their plans.)

If you mean a third party, well than that comes down to lack of trust in that party's ability to execute.

“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.

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'd agree that there are broader benefits, too.

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.

the one that is taller, talks with more confidence and has more gray hair

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.

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.)

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.)

IIRC, the Party, per se, wasn't, though a leader of that party was an agent of an organization that was.

in the US, it would look a bit different, though.

neither party is clean, and so both agree to leave questions of cleanliness off the table.

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 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.)

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?)

---

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...

Besides, who would invest in a country where people have such a mindset? And what is with companies owned by local and international shareholders?

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.

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 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 ;)

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.

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.

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.

Tell me more about how I can afford to open a new billion dollar factory.

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.

Wealthy people are already much less likely to procreate [1], although I'm not going to act as if that was planned.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility/#the-richer-the-people-...

People with more money have access to birth control and various entertainment options.

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 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.

(I think you get this tho)

I agree with this as a laudable goal, but what happens after a population free from work and want doubles and then doubles again?

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.

This isn't much of a problem in current developed nations, I don't see a good reason to suppose it will become so.

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.

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.

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.

Do you have evidence that disproves the Flynn effect…?

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).

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.

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.

What would you even say about your family? They exist? "My mom died of cancer, thanks for asking."?

If you have a problem with the way things are, at least think of something reasonable to replace it.

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.

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.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14606810

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.

    * 0   - $2k  : -1,000%
    * $2k - 4k   : -500%
    * $4k - 6k   : -100%
    * $6k - $8k  : 0%
    * $8k - $15k : 5%
    * ...
    * $10M+      : 40%

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.

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.

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.

The moochers in this system are the companies who employ 1 euro-jobbers.

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.

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.

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'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.

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:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/p/ir2.html

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>catastrophic healthcare

you already have one of those ;) What is it with US and lack of 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.

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.

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 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.

(not a joke, this is a tongue-in-cheek but serious project aimed at transitioning to a Star Trek type society).

Everyone should be be given that through UBI (universal basic income).

Great, who is going to pay them? Serious question.

(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.)

Man, the stories we tell ourselves to justify our mistakes.

I read a lot of science fiction of random quality and length[1], and there's enough of a scattershot of ideas that an expansive humanity and humans dying off are not entirely uncommon ideas, so I've had reason to think about it fairly often. While I understand a lot of people might be upset at the idea humanity dying off, being a father myself and the understanding that while I can't stick around to experience everything myself, part of what I am (in the *intellectual sense more importantly than the biological one) continues on in part through my children (one of which is not biological, but just as much a continuation in the same sense).

That we might engineer our own obsolescence is scary, but so is the knowledge that we all die. Similar to in our individual lives, I find some comfort that in my old age I might be taken care of by my legacy.

Also, using humans for batteries is stupid. There's plenty of better reasons possible and that have been put forth for that plot point. That's just low hanging fruit for nerds. ;)

1: https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/ - If you don't know what this is and you like science fiction, you're in for a treat. Check the sidebar for quality classics.

The [Machine War][1] describes how it was in the early days. The conflict started when a robot killed its human masters because they were planning to destroy it and replace by a newer model. That started a Machine Civil Rights Movements, but humanity had become lazy and arrogant due to the new lifestyle yielded by the creation of AI. Most humans refused to acknowledge the robots and the few human sympathizers who did were silenced. It's a great read/watch (if you see the anime), but I better stop here so I don't spoil anything.

After reading this, that has become my single concern about the future with AI: will humanity be able to treat and respect the machines as equals?

PS: I was reading about it just this past weekend. Such a coincidence. This thread was from where I got most of it: https://www.reddit.com/r/movies/comments/4h9ghg/in_the_matri...

[1]: http://matrix.wikia.com/wiki/Machine_War

I hope my comment didn't look like I was calling you out about these ideas. I was just excited at this coincidence and wanted to share it. They went completely unnoticed to me from watching just the movies. Makes them even better (including the sequels :P).

Amazing bit of irony if that's the case!

[1]http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/

A great many people find purpose through achieving some greater goal, or less loftily, through feeling like they matter, even if they do not. How easy is this fiction to perpetuate when you are, quite literally, house pets to the true intelligences running our society as house pets are to us?

Lest you think we'll have a place in running a future where we might have actually designed our betters, consider dogs. We love them, we pamper them, but we don't let them run wild in the streets and cause problems, because clearly they don't know what's best for them in the society they are now living. Humans may not be the dogs of the future, but let's not assume we're safe form that threat without real good assurances. To me, life in the matrix might be preferable to an existence where I'm constantly confronted by my inadequacy in any matter of import. Then again, my dog loves me, and while I feel sorry that I can't take him out as much as I believe he deserves, I'm not sure he realizes there's more to life (depending on point of view) than what he has.

So, is life without work worth living? Is contented slavery okay? I don't know. Truly. It seems like it should be bad, but how much of that is rational thought and how much of that is my culture speaking through me? My allusion to the Matrix was actually one of the more Utopian possible outcomes. At least we retain our sense of agency, even if it's a lie in reality.

Or even (plot twist!) for all the people in the Matrix to be sims / ems in a game, with the agents being actual humans playing the game, who of course have superpowers and a mysterious overarching goal because what video game character doesn't?

Almost everything was automated except for bars[1]. Having an actually job required an inane mount of schooling, testing and credentials. But gave you a life where you got to live and associate with people with somewhat meaningful lives.

[1] Automated bars existed, but to the authorities dismay, few people would patronize them.

Domino Harvey* comes to mind. She was supposedly a model turned bounty hunter. A lot of adrenaline junkies currently get their thrills doing EMS work and similar jobs. Or they have dangerous hobbies. If you take away all the constructive outlets for adrenaline junkies, you are basically left with dangerous hobbies and fomenting revolution or pursuing illegal activities merely to feel alive once in a while. This will likely not go good places.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domino_Harvey

This is one thing I think went wrong with all the 20th century modernisms. The thinking that social and emotional needs didn't matter infected all sorts of fields[1] like a cancer. Before 1960 they used to keep sick infants in sterile boxes where they failed to thrive and eventually died. Okay they don't do that now. But the equivalent exists in all sort of other places.

Excellent book.

How many professions do you come in contact with who seem unlikely to be candidates for automation?

At some point - and we're unfortunately rather a long way from that societally - we need to take stock, and consider: who, exactly, is all of this for?

Ha! Fooled you! I'm not even a real blonde.

>The Gary Works is a major steel mill in Gary, Indiana, on the shore of Lake Michigan. For many years, the Gary Works was the world's largest steel mill, and it remains the largest integrated mill in North America.

>The Gary Works remains Gary's largest single employer and a key element of the city's tax base. However, employment levels have fallen substantially since the mid-20th century; the plant and allied facilities employed over 30,000 people in the early 1970s, but only 6,000 in 1990, and 5,000 in 2015.

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

Unlike in the US, where laid off folks really have no recourse.

  The other employees maintain equipment or retool the plant for various wire gauges—hundreds of variations ranging from 4.5 millimeters to 60 millimeters.

This is just a new rolling mill to produce HQ wire, all the blue collar workers are in the iron blasts next door. You can easily get summer jobs there, which is better than going to Switzerland working in a nuclear power plant. Some pictures: https://www.google.de/search?q=voest+alpine+donawitz

For the introduction of this new automated mill they didn't cut any jobs: https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

"Digitization will continue to have no negative impact" said Eder. The transformation process would "take certainly 15 years - without job cuts," as the CEO said.

The automation process and foreign producers (Mittal) with its cheap labor had a huge positive impact on us architects then. We were able to cut costs on huge steel buildings, e.g. the RESOWI University in Graz, which I also worked on, the largest building in the country. It was planned for 1.2bill and was finished under 800m, just because the steel price exactly from this company VOEST Alpine went down dramatically. Before everything was build with concrete, brick or wood, then suddenly steel had an unexpected rise in popularity.

PS: He is Brazilian, and gave lessons about the field of philosophy to Obama on university.

It almost certainly did not require 10 * 1000 person-years to produce all the machinery that this factory needs to run for 10 years. If it did, it wouldn't have been a cost savings.