We don't want jobs; we want lots of things (and services), very cheaply. Jobs are the traditional way we were getting them. If there's another way of getting them, that will be fine.
One thing I learned from Julian Simon: things always get better. One thing I learned from Christianity: people love to predict the end of the world.
I didn't watch the entire second video; when he started explaining how the taxes are lower in a democracy compared to a dictatorship I just got annoyed.
We already have a job market where a significant number of people have become permanently unemployable because their competences are not wanted.
Now imagine mass unemployment not only in blue collar work but also in white collar work due to automation. If unemployed white collar workers cannot get jobs and blue collar workers cannot migrate to white collar jobs because both job types are replaced by automation and AI, where will they get an income?
Meanwhile the argument ignores the not so far away reality where automation is available to the people who already have resources and jobs today, leaving even more people who currently have little without jobs and automation.
A job is not a right today, it is a responsibility. Our society assumes that everyone, or at least a large majority of all that can, has a job. How do we prepare for a future where the majority cannot get a job?
The most promising answer currently seems to be Basic Income. Though that leaves me asking too. How will we convince people and corporations that have to give up more of their income and accept taxing their property, to redistribute all resources to a huge mass of people that have not money, nor influence? It seems very easy as long as it isn't your own money. Paying taxes, few say that they enjoy that.
[I agree that "it's owned by someone" can be a problem more than "there's not enough land". Unfortunately, that's politics so I have no quick solution.]
As for what happens to the poor in future generations, it depends on bringing out the best in those with the power to choose. I don't think the alternative is helpful to entertain at this point. The only question is whether we can mature as a race to share without force, or whether balance will be made using force (government coercion, etc...). It's a question about how much faith we have in the human race to grow up quickly.
1) Individuals have their own robots. For example, everybody gets their own automated hydroponic garden, enough to provide them with sufficient calories.
2) A dictatorship seizes control of the automation and lets the people starve.
I think it's very unlikely that we'll have a welfare-capitalist society where major corporations own mass automation, where the government taxes the corporation so highly that government can pay for everyone else to survive.
Taxing mass automation to pay for basic income is just too fragile. If the people themselves aren't providing wealth through productive labor, then at some point, somebody will try to starve them instead of feeding them, and they'll succeed.
Having all production automated will result in falling prices, including the cost to automate something. This should result in a lot of competition, driving prices down even more. In this scenario, it is difficult to imagine someone having a monopoly on production for long, unless they are already a dictator.
Dictators tend to have to keep at least a portion of their population happy, otherwise they lose control. A large portion of the population with nothing to loose (as they are starving) tends to result in revolution. If the cost of production (or cost of imports) is close to 0, what motivation (beyond bond style villany) does a dictator have to make their population starve?
If everyone is out of work, no one has any money to pay for the products of the capital owners. What's the point of that?
The portion can be very small. It has to include the military, and it has to include the people involved in creating GDP, but if production is centralized (e.g. because the nation's resources are in digging stuff out of the ground), then the masses can be kept very poor.
Watch the "Rules for Rulers" video I linked above. Resource-rich dictators don't need to provide public education or adequate roads, say nothing of adequate food. "The people stay quiet, not because this is fine, or because they're scared, but because the cold truth is: starving, disconnected illiterates don't make good revolutionaries."
So can production be centralized in the face of mass automation? I think so. Look at farming. Seizing control of all of the farms in the 1880s would be a massive operation spanning the entire North American continent. Seizing control of today's Big Farming conglomerates would be relatively straightforward for a modern dictator.
Which is to say, we'll get through this if the automation is decentralized, but if it's like farming, where a few expensive machines make all of the food for hundreds of millions of people, then we're on a path to ruin.
I'm following the 3D-printing and makerspace movement because of this. It's imperative that blueprints for vital objects to be 3D-printed aren't locked up by copyrights.
This portion might end up being very small: i.e. a small, highly automated, robotic military, an automated surveillance/intelligence apparatus, and a few elites who own all the big corporations along with their top AI designers, weapons designers, etc. You could probably wipe out 99% of the population and still pull this off.
If a class of resource is cheap and abundant, evil dictators/1%ers don't really have much motivation to prevent people accessing those things, unless they feel it somehow undermines their control.
I also think there would be less motivation to become a dictator if you didn't have to fight everyone else for limited resources.
It would also be much harder for the warlord type to motivate others around them to do their bidding if those others are well fed/clothed/housed.
The typo just triggered the tritism in my head: a person with nothing to lose has a lot to loose.
I've always held that the people on HN are more of builders than profit maximizeds. As a result you don't hear or encounter people who think in a different manner.
In particular you don't hear people say "why should my factories/effort/investment go to subsidize people who do nothing." Or a variety of similar arguments which have different starting assumptions.
Essentially the BI+automation arguments largely depend on a milk of human kindness in a world where the incentives for a large number of people and nations is not so aligned.
People will always make choices on the margin and the betterment of humanity usually comes a distant last to personal welfare. To balance this out means a huge number of taxes/laws/incentives to prevent that outcome.
You guys (Americans) are going to be fighting over your basic assumptions of society (capitalist with caveats vs "socialists" with caveats) very soon.
But all of this assumes that automation happens and takes away jobs. it likely won't, it will most likely replace well Paying jobs with less well paying jobs.
At this point economists will talk about retraining people but that's bs - there physical limits to how fast neurons can be retrained and that's if you don't have any other time demands/financial issues/health issues/aptitude issues.
What if in the future all food's patented? What if due to climate change the traditional stocks don't grow, or due to regulation you can't grow it. Maybe actual cows are illegal, but you can vat-grow beef-like food.
This is why having open-source, affordably licensed technology is imperative. Affordable for some people might mean free, which makes certain licenses absolutely paramount.
If we can build our own robots, design our own food, we're no longer wage slaves. If we can't, if we must feed into some system that extracts heavy taxes from all of us, the opposite is true.
This is why I don't care about using proprietary software. So long as I have options which aren't proprietary I'm content, and if those options are threatened it's worth defending them. This is different from trying to destroy proprietary software.
Do you pay for the air you breath? Does the government tax corporations to provide a basic air income for people to ensure that everyone gets their fair share of air? No. Why not?
The reason you don't pay for the air you breath is because air is so immensely plentiful, so easy to get, so impossible for anyone from stopping you from getting, that of course it doesn't cost anything.
Imagine if things like food were the same.
No no no no. Souvereign investment is not income constrained, taxation does not even need to enter the picture.
These places are utterly undemocratic, though, being monarchies with few limitations. This is because it takes a rather small clique to control the oil wells and pipes that produce, say, 80% of the national budget. Once they are in power, other citizens have little to do to limit their power. The next guy to depose them is tempted (and usually yields to the temptation) to build the next version of the same regime. The countries that buy the oil (or gold, or whatever the single key product is) don't care about democracy in these countries; they care about stability of their supplies, and thus stability of the regime in the country.
Now replace oil wells with robotic factories plus a few key power stations. If all of this requires a small amount of people to operate, and is as easy to physically control as oil wells, you might have the same situation. 90% of population are suddenly irrelevant, living on a whim of the small group of rulers who control 80-90% of GDP.
Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the majority discovers it can vote itself largess out of the public treasury. After that, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits with the result the democracy collapses because of the loose fiscal policy ensuing, always to be followed by a dictatorship, then a monarchy.
A very old idea from the ancient greeks. I completely agree with this theory. Sadly, I'm often treated like a conspiracy theorist when I tell people about it.
The idea is simple, there are seven stages of governance for people.
1. Monarchy, 2. Kingship, 3. Tyranny, 4. Aristocracy, 5. Oligarchy, 6. Democracy, and 7. Ochlocracy
The cycle just endlessly repeats itself through time.
I think you're absolutely right that Trump supporters' motivation seems to be "I work my ass off and don't have anything to show for it" (born out of wage stagnation in real terms). But the question would still be "Then why didn't they simply support a candidate that promised welfare increases?"
Part of the answer is that Clinton didn't lean on redistribution as her narrative to the degree Sanders did, probably to prevent Republican attacks. The optimist in me also likes to think that there is something in the American zeitgeist about work earning rewards. Which I think is confounded by two modern trends: free trade / automomation depressing or eliminating low and middle wage jobs, and a growing realization of wealth disparity and work effort disparity (e.g. myself making many multiples more than someone breaking their back building infrastructure).
End result being someone comparing their work effort to what he or she sees on TV, then comparing their rewards to what he or she sees on TV. And feeling depressed and angry as a result.
Next year we will spent around 25% on refugees. I wonder when the point of an emergency budget arrives.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/budget-battle-be...
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germany-co...
http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2016-02/fluechtlinge-haushalt-...
interestingly, German sources like Zeit estimates / writes about 50 billion for 2017, while all English sources low ball here. (or don´t cite the source) Zeit is a pretty well known source.
As we both know, projects and estimations are are hard! Very hard! So I guess it will be around 60 billion :)
Tax revenue plans around 230 to 300 billion. Hence the 25% and my guess that they will announce soon or later an emergency budget to cut costs (we have a law, basically saying: we must go to our black 0, at all costs) Cutting costs hits the usual targets (I guess):
https://www.iwkoeln.de/en/iw-news/beitrag/german-budget-why-...
http://www.dw.com/en/sch%C3%A4uble-clings-to-black-zero-feti...
Social services Infrastructure School and education
etc.
Interesting times are ahead :)
What a problem is that germans arw too expensive. Back when germany invited the turkish people they at least admitted they wanted cheap labor.
Now they are just lying. Or completely ignoring that in ten or twenty years those people will be useless and sit at home because a ton of those jobs will be automated.
http://www.latimes.com/world/europe/la-fg-germany-refugees-d...
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2016/jan/06/refuge...
However, I am not sure it is likely that western democracies with diverse economies can regress to sufficiently concentrated ownership of production to facilitate a dictatorial regime. In the case of the US, 0.1% of 350 million is still 350,000, so there are a lot of highly motivated rich people who would like to avoid losing in a winner takes all dictatorship. A government that supports the rule of law, property rights etc. is a necessary 'evil' if you are one of the 0.1% who might lose out in the dictator scenario, as that rule of law is all that prevents the 0.1% from turning into <0.0001%. I think it is easy to facilitate dictatorship in an undeveloped, poor economy, but less so in a diverse, developed economy, even one with significant wealth inequality. The more diverse the economy, the more keys to power.
There is some interesting (and somewhat relevant) commentary on historical thought about paying for government in Mark Blyth's talk at google[1], which contains the following conclusions:
-Democracy is Asset Insurance for the Rich
-Redistribution and Debt is Reinsurance for Democracy
-Austerity is Anorexia for the Economy
His comments on Brazil in the Q&A after the talk are also relevant.
Art is a log scale when it comes to compensation - and many of the best paid are dead.
The issue is not job loss, its job replacement with worse paying service sector jobs which act as a barrier to upward social movement (because lower pay means less access to various positive network effects)
Relative to stuff we place higher utility on than art, because opportunity cost. But as the price of that stuff approaches zero due to mass automation of production so does the opportunity cost of art.
For instance, they won't allow automation of this kind on their ground. As Ned Ludd would have it, they will keep the machines out and the humans in.
Suddenly their production is much costlier that what the robot-running neighbors produce. They can't export it (nobody would buy), but they can still locally consume it. But for that they need to limit the imports of the same thing to keep the prices up.
As the list of robot-produced goods grows, more and more import restrictions are added, and things cheaply available abroad become dear and inaccessible in the country.
I don't think a democratic government with a policy like that will last too long.
It looks more interesting to think how to distribute the ownership, a share in a huge robotic factory so that it is not easily falls under control of a single person or a small group. It might be an interesting game-theoretic problem.
Popular wisdom seems to look at China / Mexico manufacturing as supported by low labor costs, but in reality they're more and more supported by capital-intensive automation (enabled by the systems engineering expertise at running the low-labor cost plants originally).
Truly communist institutions, e.g. some monasteries, just abolish the notion of propery. They need unusually and highly motivated people to operate, though, that are few and fail to be mass-produced.
But you should watch that in contrast with one of his newest videos, "The Rules for Rulers" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
> The more the wealth of a nation comes from the productive citizens of the nation, the more the power gets spread out, and the more the ruler must maintain the quality of life for those citizens. The less, the less.
> Now if a stable democracy becomes very poor, or if a resource that dwarfs the productivity of the citizens is found, the odds of this gamble change, and make it more possible for a small group to seize power.