Jobs are disappearing. They aren't "coming back" in greater numbers. And the new jobs, by and large, aren't for the previous workforce.
We already live in a world where many jobs are unnecessary. A large portion of government jobs are, essentially, welfare jobs. One of the systematic reasons of for the expansion of government is "job creation". Politicians will create jobs, but those jobs add nothing to society. We've got people pretending to work a job to collect a paycheck. It's welfare.
The industrial revolution replaced muscle with machine, but brainpower was still a required input. There was a clear shift: from doing the work to using a machine to do the same work, but faster. There was enough demand that things didn't collapse.
The current shift is replacing both muscle and brainpower. Outside of creative jobs, what is left for the human to do? Make the brain smarter? We are already entering into a time where the machine makes itself smarter without the advent of the human.
New jobs will be created, sure. But those jobs will not be for the 1.8 million truck drivers. Instead the government will likely end up soaking it up through one program or another. Tens of thousands will end up in welfare jobs. Hundreds of thousands will end up on long term disability. The numbers aren't small.
UBI is an inevitability. You've got some 40 million people on food stamps, about 9 million on disability. Millions more working pointless government jobs like directing people from one TSA employee to another. At what point to we recognize that the future does not look like the past?
You are right that ongoing elimination of jobs is a problem leading to huge social unrest, and UBI fits the bill to be a good solution for this.
The only problem with UBI is that it is unsustainable and therefore impossible. The balance just doesn't check out. The mere retirement schemes are in grave danger of collapse; the money there are long spent. UBI is huge, and there is no way to get this kind of money from anywhere (even if you strip away all capital from the top 1% and send them to labor camps, as it was done elsewhere, the money from this will fuel $1000/month UBI for about 2 years tops).
Antigravity would be an excellent solution to our space travel challenges, but we don't know any way to make it work. It is exactly the same with UBI.
Honestly, I'm excited to see what happens as it will happen in my lifetime. 30 years ago we had the first general purpose computers. Look at where we are now. Today we have the first general purpose robots. Imagine where we will be in 30 years. It's hard to imagine.
Drivers, construction workers, doctors, lawyers—it's all going to be dramatically different 30 years from now. Forget the US. All those jobs making everything from iPhones to t-shirts will also be at risk. When you don't need specialized equipment and you can buy a robot that can make t-shirts for a few thousand dollars you don't need the human anymore.
If not UBI, then what? What do all these people do?
Guarding the robots.
Face it; self-driving cars and trucks are going to be a HUGE target of vandalism and theft at first, especially for people who're made unemployed by them and can't find other jobs.
You're gonna need other people to keep them safe, and carrying guns doesn't require a lot of retraining in the US at least.
Those soon-to-be-out-of-work drivers may very well be required to tag along with the upcoming robot-vehicles anyway, to sit in them as guards and protect them from the rioting Luddites.
Until we can make robotic clones of Arnold Schwarzenegger to automate this as well, that is.
UBI inevitability:
---
Market forces are inevitable. Human behavior is inevitable. The future does look like the past.
> went into other endeavors
We are automating away entire classes of jobs, so this will require retraining. How, exactly, do you propose to send half[2] of the workforce to college for retraining in a highly technical field? Assuming this was even possible and assuming there will be jobs for all of these new programmers/etc, is this retraining cheaper than UBI or other plans? It is relatively easy for a farmer to learn another trade that requires primarily physical work. Retraining drivers for unautomatable technical work is a lot harder and more expensive.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU
[2] Driving is the largest category of jobs. The next handful of job types (e.g. retail sales, various clerical work, customer service/support) are also being automated away. Together is very roughly half of all jobs.
TL;DR - just watch [1]
If any conceivable software was free, required no human labor, and instantaneous: Would the world be a better or a worse place? (although I'd need to find something else to do)
If computers replace doctors, and I get better care for cheaper, aren't I better off?
...If every job was automated, and you can press a button to have robots make software or do medical tasks, that is the ultimate UBI for every person on earth. Everything is free, and then everyone can do whatever they want to fill their days.
P.S. - I want my own clothes-folding coffee-making robot.
P.P.S. - One tiny thing the video said, that is a piece of incorrect common wisdom: Auto insurance companies will not be helped by automated cars, they'll be hurt greatly. If accident rates decrease, premiums decrease, and so the insurance companies margins (and float) decrease, making less revenue and profits.
Doctors have a state-guaranteed monopoly that is created via lobbying. That is why, in many countries, doctors are extremely expensive -- even though most of the miracle of healing is done by medicine.
In the future it will probably be a doctor owning and "supervising" the machine. Patients use the machine (paying $XXX). A doctor will take 30 seconds to one minute to look at the results, sign it and your prescription and then charge you exactly the same as before.
The only way the general public will benefit is from more accurate prescriptions. But I sincerely doubt that the cost of a doctor's visit will be reduced significantly. But don't worry, the laws will the there for your own good.
PS: MYCIN was already developed in the 70ies, and showed higher accuracy than doctors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin
As an analog to Wirth's law I'd suggest that in the transportation industry, technological advances in mitigating damage risk are offset by increased risk tolerance in seeking higher throughput / lower latency in the transport of goods and people.
So while the absolute accident rate will go down and the number of meatbag casualties will be reduced by automation removing human error, the _severity_ of catastrophic failure damaging _property_ will increase due to the incentives to push more autos through the pipes in less time: extreme tailgating, hyper-dense cargo, excessive velocity, and bountiful heterogeneity.
Really this is about a transition from (mainly) insuring against loss-of-life to (mainly) insuring against destruction-of-property. Of course, humans will still die even in 'negligible' quantities. But an actuary's loss-of-life liability assessment doesn't need to discriminate between fatal blunt trauma and fatal atomization.
Some aging countries will face a severe loss in standard of living if they fail to automate huge parts of the economy. Presumably the worlds population will not continue to grow infinitely and at some point labor shortages will be a big problem.
One of the most destructive outcomes could come from poor government policy during an economic transition. Socialist or capitalist is one thing, but policies which are in direct opposition to another is another ( e.g. Venezuela, Zimbabwe.)
There are also big AI existential risk issues, but I think that is separate from the labor impact.
Maybe at some point people will just throw up their hands and start to embrace higher taxes on capital and UBI, but I'm not holding my breath.
That's assuming that programming won't be one of the first categories of jobs to be automated away by AI. Think of the cost savings! But thankfully we don't have to worry about what all those poor programmers are going to do since it's progress for humanity.
I think specialisation in software will be the first to go not programing itself.
I expect machine learning software to get very good at finding and fixing software exploits in the next few years. Google used deepmind and machine learning to optimise their energy use. How long before (maybe they are doing it already) put it to work on optimising their software code like chrome and android etc to find to speed it up or find exploits.Nursing, at least part of it, is about empathy and care. If someone is in the hospital getting robot heart surgery, someone has to help guide them through the practice. I do not see robot empathy in the next 50 years. Same reason I do not see robot counselors on the horizon ;)
We've had technology replace mental labor before too.[0]
Spreadsheets democratized accounting and while making the work easier, also put a tax prep firm on every corner in the US. It vastly increased the number of people performing some sort of accounting. Some are small business owners that do it themselves, and can now hire a few extra employees.
We've had AI that can write beautiful music for ages, now it can duplicate the style of any composer,[1] but we largely don't care and still have pop stars. And composers.
The work Taylor Swift does for her millions of dollars probably involves layers of cultivating a story about a real person, responding correctly to paparazzi in different scenarios, and judging when to capitalize on interactions on Twitter between other celebrities. This probably sounds like I'm saying she's calculating, but really it has to be an enormous amount of instinct, because it's all probably not reducible to any series of tasks that can be enumerated or even perhaps knowable. Several people have tried to analyze her success, I'm not sure anyone actually understands it.[2][3]
More important for ordinary employees, we still have people compose film scores for some reason. Maybe because even if you can emulate other composers, someone has to decide which composer to emulate, which means having some ability to guess at another artist's as yet unexpressed artistic vision. Once you have the decades of training and experience to do all that, might as well write the thing yourself. Maybe recommendation engines could get there, but I'm not sure those work with novel creations, and I'm not sure we're even interested in perfecting those anymore for areas where they're proven (more or less) to work.[4]
Maybe the weird thing about mental assistants is that they expand the workforce, rather than reducing it. Robots are set up to run automatically, but all the AI we develop is driven by humans to solve day to day problems.
It's like if instead of robotics we built programmable exoskeletons or mechs. The number of employees would explode. There'd still be people building everything, inside the machines. That's what we're doing with computers in a lot of fields. Software is most often like a suit our brain wears to think faster or more reliably.
On the other hand, there are also examples of muscle jobs that haven't yet been perfectly replaced.[5]
The lack of a sewing robot (or ubiquitous clothes folding robots as another commenter mentioned) illustrates that we tend to overgeneralize. Some brawn problems are easy, and some are hard. Same for brain problems. Some problems will stick around, either stubbornly unable to be mechanized, or just not worth the cost.
Also, feedback systems kick in to ensure that labor force participation bounces between reasonable extremes. A lot of the recent downturn in the LFPR can be attributed to retirees.[6] It seems to be leveling off or even heading up again, but regardless the US rate remains well within historical norms.[7]
Sorry this turned out super long and rambly.
[0] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/25/389027988/episo...
[1] http://newatlas.com/creative-artificial-intelligence-compute...
[2] https://blog.longreads.com/2014/07/07/taylor-swift-is-a-musi...
[3] http://www.gq.com/story/taylor-swift-gq-cover-story?currentP...
[4] http://www.slashfilm.com/happened-netflixs-recommendation-en...
[5] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/08/03/488611449/episo...
[6] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-19/why-labor-...
[7] http://data.bls.gov/generated_files/graphics/latest_numbers_...
I can't seem to export the BLS page I generated. Basically fully expand the range of this page to see the entire history: http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000
Perhaps we'd be in a better place today. We can't know for sure, without first experimenting.
Wealth inequality is a real and growing problem, and I believe is a much bigger impediment to human progress than a basic income would be.
What about the millions of incredibly intelligent minds who could be earning the big bucks on Wall Street, but instead are toiling away 7 days a week in research labs at universities, surviving only off the small budget they're allocated? Are they working to survive, or are they surviving just to work?
What about the millions who would love to further their education, but instead have to work two jobs to support a family?
Personally, I come from a lower income background and would never have had the opportunity to go to university if it wasn't for the generous social support my country has.
Humans are inherently enterprising creatures. Yes, a basic income will enable some to sit around and do nothing. But those people have already found ways to do that, and why should we stop them? The people who truly want to change the world are not going to be impeded by some cash handed to them.
it's not just income,it's the network the ghetto,the mindset,the culture...
it's just so hard to move up...of those stories? probably less then 10%
I'm not saying it wouldn't quickly turn into 51% of the people voting themselves 100% of the money (which would quickly become worth nothing), but it isn't the worst idea out there.
Can you recommend any reading on this?
Neat to think about, but would take a miracle for most people to take seriously.
http://www.cato-unbound.org/2014/08/04/matt-zwolinski/pragma...
[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why-aren...
So for many it is too small to matter either because they don't have dependents, don't work enough, or work too much. But it's actually a near damned perfect incentive to keep people working and trying to find better jobs while keeping them out of abject poverty. Likely the best anti-poverty tool the US government has blindly stumbled upon ever.
The EIC is on top of the programs Friedman wanted to replace.
First, the initial (expensive) investment in the self-driving trucks will offset the wage gains from not hiring truckers ----, so shipping costs will remain where they are mostly for the first few years at least until this is balanced.
Second, the "increased spending"/"creation of new jobs" effect might only be relevant if the shipping costs are a significant part of the final price of a product. From what I've seen, it's at most 10% (at most), and less for the average item. That's why we can have $1 stuff that comes all the way from China.
But, let's accept that this (reduced retail prices) will happen, there are other things I don't see working with this idea:
>Who knows what they will spend the extra money on, could be healthcare, boats, TVs, whatever. But new jobs will be created in these expanded industries.
Which, more likely than not, wont involve people with trucking skills.
And most likely wont involve domestic labor either, most things are made abroad (China, etc) anyway.
>It really, really bothers me the constant "x technology will drive x people out of work, therefore we need Universal Basic Income, so they won't starve!"
That's because your whole job sector hasn't been deprecated when you're forty (or approaching)...
>Instead of UBI, people were forced to leave farming and went into other endeavors
That was in a time those other endeavours had a huge boom and needed tons of hands (and even so, millions of ex-farmers ended up getting the short stick).
We don't have an industrial revolution expanding the need for workers now, we have a software/automation revolution slowly decreasing workers demands sector by sector.
In fact we haven't had a need for more workers for quite a few decades -- what we did is inflate, as much as we can, the services sector to compensate for it instead. But there's only so many service type jobs really viable, plus automation also begins to eat into them, and with the squeezed middle classes pinching pennies its even bleaker for them (being non essential et al), even if decreased shipping costs turn out to mean a (huge and unrealistic) 10% more income.
Trucking won't disappear overnight.
It might not disappear overnight but it sure as hell isn't going to take 150 years!
Humans also have a tendency to always think "it'll stay the same as is right now".
Lots of industries and jobs pretty much disappeared overnight -- it took centuries or millennia for that to happen in the past.
Automation makes sense for long haul highways, so truck drivers will shift to being last mile drivers.
Once there's enough driverless vehicles large trucks can signal smaller vehicles things like "I need to turn right so please leave me room in the left turn lane to my right". Frankly the tow truck industry needs some disrupting. At least here in Houston they are the most dangerous lawless drivers on the road and need to go.
We might even be in a better place than we are today. There would be even more entrepreneurship and labor would have more bargaining power when entering new industries.
Nothing about UBI prevents there from being new opportunities created. If anything, it provides for more potential for those opportunities by encouraging people to leave shitty low-productivity jobs to start their own thing or to search for a higher productivity job.
I agree with both of you, though one is for and other against UBI.
I suggest a compromise. A linear increase in ubi from 0 to sustainable. I think going straight to sustainable is a little too drastic all of a sudden. It's like if we invented teleportation. That would destroy trucking faster than AI. But it would be chaos too.
Call the networks. :)
> A linear increase in ubi from 0 to sustainable.
I agree that going straight to UBI would be impractical, both politically and economically. My preferred approach would be a step function: we eliminate one entitlement program at a time, and replace it with a corresponding amount of UBI.
That seems like a highly debatable statement.
However, it can be reasoned about. I have two arguments:
1. It is hard to start a company while working for someone else, particularly if you're working in a low-wage job. There is definitely evidence for this phenomenon, as unemployment leads to more entrepreneurship. [0]
2. It is hard to start a company while starving. Starting a company requires a longer time horizon than finding a job. Hence, if there isn't a adequate social support in place, I think a lot of people will prioritize finding a job over starting a company. This is born out in some empirical studies. [1]
[0] https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/rs394tot.pdf
[1] http://www.kauffman.org/~/media/kauffman_org/resources/2016/...
You're not comparing apples to apples.
These may or may not be the same people. I think it is important we understand in detail how humans become creative before large scale implementation of UBI.
Personally I believe UBI should be earned in some way, with some kind of duty/responsibility (that doesn't require coming into work everyday obviously e.g. having trained to be part of an armed response corp or a diaster response agency).
Presently Israel makes people train for the army for a year or two, which I believe is partially responsible for their high level of innovation. I believe the garages in the US serve a similar helpful function (in my country people don't have them, in the US they seem like a default).
Having people just work together is a very difficult but necessarily task and I believe obtaining UBI should require that.
I say so as a person who finds working with people quite difficult!
Does anybody remember the Decentralized Republic from the Diamond Age making people do random (strange) things together to string their society together?
How is that relevant? UBI doesn't propose to eliminate jobs (even stressful ones), just make them non-compulsory.
If you're saying that these people would simply not get a stressful job if they had UBI, hence they wouldn't perform at an high level, what about if they currently choose a non-stressful job? Doesn't your argument imply we should force people to take certain jobs, even against their will, so that they perform at an high level?
Presently Israel makes people train for the army for a year or two, which I believe is partially responsible for their high level of innovation.
There are 71 countries in the world with compulsory conscription, including Algeria, Austria, Austria, Azerbaijan, Benin, Bolivia, Brazil, Cambodia, Cape Verde, Colombia, Côte d'Ivoire, Cyprus, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, Finland, Georgia, Greece, Guatemala, Iran, Kuwait, Laos, Moldova, Mongolia, Norway, Paraguay, Russia, Switzerland, Taiwan, Tunisia, Turkey, Turkmenistan, the United Arab Emirates and Uzbekistan.
Do you see them all as countries with high levels of innovation? Have you considered that the correlation may be spurious?
Having people just work together is a very difficult but necessarily task and I believe obtaining UBI should require that.
How do you account then for the existence of the Open Source community, a mostly voluntary collaboration between many thousands of inviduals often thought to be people with poor social skills? Not to mention all the volunteer-based non-profits, churches, events, etc?
> How is that relevant?
Well, people are motivated differently from each other and at different stages in their lives. Have you ever noticed some people intentionally generate stress? They do that because they require it to get themselves going. Stress isn't always a bad thing, that's mostly the continual low level stress that can hurt health.
> Doesn't your argument imply we should force people to take certain jobs, even against their will, so that they perform at an high level?
No. Some jobs deserve higher pay because they aren't pleasant but in the current environment they receive minuscule wages because people have no other options.
I am saying two things about the role of stress. One is that many, perhaps most people, have been 'coached' by workplace experience to endure stress. In a way they are institutionalized. The same thing occurs with schooling. It serves a purpose but that diminishes under UBI.
This means many maladaptive habits exist, like overly sensitive stress responses, that will take many years to break out of, perhaps even requiring a generational change before the full effects of UBI are evident.
Let's use an extreme example, consider the mental model of a member of ISIS. If you give them UBI, you change literally nothing about this person and their attempts to strap bombs to their bodies because their entire mental model was never aligned with optimizing their personal outcomes. Similarly many people are hardwired into existing mental models to such an extent that UBI may simply bounce off them. This is sometimes expressed by the inhabitants of urban ghettos as 'you can take the girl out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the girl'.
The second thing is that most people really do currently require stress in order to operate. When they feel a tangible connection to 'survival mode', they get stuff done. Otherwise they risk stagnation. This is a simple fact that cannot be hand waved away.
Examine the lives of lottery winners if you want to see a full spectrum of irrational behavior. Only a few manage to become the improved human you want them to be. Look at the communities of those who subsist nearly entirely on welfare. There are whole housing estates in the UK where nobody has held a job in generations and it has caused immense harm.
It is interesting to note that once they become 'pensioners', they become quite a bit happier.
People like to have a solid justification for their existence. You have to provide for that, or allow them to provide that, regardless of what happens.
I think all this can be solved, but first it has to be thought about in depth.
> There are 71 countries in the world with compulsory conscription,
They are not all the same (and it doesn't have to be conscription). Some countries do it better than others. It is hard to explain with words but it is something you know when you see it. The US and Israel have it. Eritrea and Iraq do not. The soldiers of the USA and Israel are proud of their role and see themselves as part of a higher noble purpose. The soldiers of Eritrea and Afghanistan manifestly do not. We may be sure the first two groups will work well together in forming businesses.
Conscription or not, this is something that can be cultivated.
It is also a single factor, I was not using it as a universal explanation of everything innovation related. What I am saying is that people who work under short periods of severe stress make for good teams to do anything.
It is hard to do this convincingly artificially, corporate team building is mostly placebo in comparison, that's why I suggested the army but police or disaster response may work just as well.
> How do you account then for the existence of the Open Source community, a mostly voluntary collaboration between many thousands of inviduals often thought to be people with poor social skills? Not to mention all the volunteer-based non-profits, churches, events, etc?
The communities you referred to are mostly built on reputation, duty and self selection. They're what I'm talking about. Those kinds of people aren't going to have a problem in a UBI world.
The problem is that not everybody is in such a community. Many people define themselves by their job or role. That concept has to be transferred to something broader for UBI to work.
Even in the software community, a huge number of programmers are not actually part of a community such as this one. They perform solo, within corporate walls.
> It really, really bothers me the constant "x technology will drive x people out of work, therefore we need Universal Basic Income, so they won't starve!"
This is incredibly fanciful look at the future. The population cannot grow AND lose jobs to machines. Disruption is having its own variant of Moore's Law, in that, we are disrupting more industries at a faster rate.
UBI, or some form of which, will not only be necessary, but likely inevitable. The improvement of humanity you speak of is in fact a humanity that will survive on creativity, not labour. Labour is done.
Additionally, capitalism doesn't care about "expanded industries" any more than Moore's Law cares about engineers who made their career in the 1980s.
The transition is necessary, and it will be hard, and it won't happen without social security. It's a complete fantasy to see it happening any other way.
decreased shipping costs will go into the pockets of the business owners as additional profits.
Since I'm already used to paying $X for that, why would you necessarily cut that out when you can keep it?
Just another possibility.
Relying on abstract economic theories about market efficiency is stupid when you're literally watching this happen all around us.
that's simplistic - people generally don't want to be unemployed. if they get enough money to (barely) scrap by it takes a lot of weight off their shoulders, because they know they wont starve without their jobs. but having a job that fulfills you and income that enables you to save money is a big part of being happy. the (healthy) unemployed i know are mostly young people and every single one of them is constantly applying for jobs, even though they're able to pay rent, food and the occasional treat on unemployment benefits.
American Population in 1850: 23 million.
American Population today: 319 million.
American Farmers in 1850: 14.72 million.
American Farmers today: 6.38 million.
Basically we've gotten just better than twice as efficient in farming labor in 160 years (this is measured in man-hours worked). The value of that labor is what has changed. Farming itself is more efficient and we can feed 10 times as many people via refrigeration and shipping.
The 62%, obviously.
The article cites $40k average pay per driver. That's fast-food wages
Not really. That's basically $20/hour full-time.
Trucking wages are not the greatest, but it feeds your family and pays the bills. The cost savings may be small but coming from a small town where 1/4 of the working population has class 3 and class 1 licenses operating these machines. It's a middle class lifestyle for these communities.
[1] http://trucker.com/trucker-jobs/equipment-driver-pay-push-op...
What then?
Surely some people will opt to not have a job at all, if they didn't need to worry about maintaining a minimum quality of life and that's not necessarily a bad thing.
And unless you have some hard data showing people on public assistance use their free time doing the unsung dirty work society needs, I don't believe it will magically start happening if we change the name of welfare to UBI.
Also, just because no one is willing to pay for what you do doesn't mean you are doing nothing. I think there will be a bunch of people doing different things than now and many anti-UBI people would call what they gonna do 'sitting around'.
The next problem is that no one seems to appreciate how incompatible it is with open borders in a world of nation-states. The latter is particularly telling since advocates of UBI are often advocates of less restrictive immigration across the world, yet they don't seem to see the problem. It's an indication of how ungrounded the discussion about UBI is right now.
Matter can't travel faster than c. Thermodynamics is a bitch.
These theories are as intractable as they are annoying. They are not proven beyond doubt. But before launching a venture in contradiction to them, evidence must be mounted. "It feels right" isn't a scientific basis for policy.
Who knows what they will spend the extra money on, could be healthcare, boats, TVs, whatever. But new jobs will be created in these expanded industries.
It really, really bothers me the constant "x technology will drive x people out of work, therefore we need Universal Basic Income, so they won't starve!"
Imagine telling a farmer in 1850s America, when 64% of America farmed, that in 2016 only 2% of people would be farming! Imagine the distopian horror (1)! If we had established UBI then, and people could get paid to sit around, imagine the state we'd be in today.
Instead of UBI, people were forced to leave farming and went into other endeavors, leading to the enormous improvement in production, income and standard of living since then. If 64% of people still farmed, or 2% farmed and 62% were on UBI - who would have had the time or incentive to create computers, software, advances in healthcare, etc?
I'm not claiming the transition is easy for someone who's laid off - it can be an extremely tough process, but it's absolutely necessary for the improvement of humanity.
(1) http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/20/us/farm-population-lowest-...