We got to talking. At one point in the conversation he asked me a hypothetical question about how I would design a system to determine traffic conditions. I responded with an answer laying out cameras at intersections and software to make sense of the video.

He responded that in China they’d just put a person at every intersection who would send a text message to a team of humans who would update a webpage. It drove home the point to me that labour was so abundant and cheap there that you could often throw more bodies at the problem instead of writinf software... and probably solve the problem better.

What is useless to one man is a lifeline to another.

I saw a documentary on NHK, and one of the points it made is that there are millions and millions and millions of people in China who need a job — any job — just to put food on the table. These are people who are so poor and poorly educated that they don't even know how to write their own names. Signatures are done with a fingerprint in red ink.

This one guy was so very happy to be employed full-time clearing sidewalks. With a broom made of twigs during the warm months, and with the same broom made of twigs to slowly clear deep snow in the cold months. But he was employed, by an organization that will pay him regularly and won't cheat him on his wages. So he's grateful to be better off than most of the other people he knows.

Over years I agree that many jobs diminished with the introduction of machines (vacuum trucks, etc.). It would be a tough job for the government to find more positions in this kind.

Same result.

The missed point in "someone spending time on a meaningless job promotes social stability" is that you're forcing (via money and requiring same for sustenance) an individual to spend most of their life in a meaningless way in order to survive.

Is it a solution to resolving social unrest? Yes.

But let's not kid ourselves about what's actually being done.

* To say nothing of the argument that by artificially depressing wages you make your economy dependent on manual labor, limiting re-investment in automation, thereby eventually dooming yourself when other countries have cheaper labor / cost-effective automation

I don't think a solution to internal disagreements can or should exist.

And this isn't a one side or the other thing. Division benefits both sides, and so playing up to their villainy works in a nice symbiotic relationship. Both sides in office are playing the exact same game, and they play it very well. There was an email from the DNC leaks from Bill Ivey, former chairman of the national endowment for the arts, to John Podesta [1]. I think he phrased things quite succinctly, "We've all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking - and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging.".

How many people voted for Clinton thinking, "Yes - I think this politician is somebody that stands for what I truly value and will make a very good president." How many people voted for her because the alternative was completely unthinkable? And similarly for Trump voters. It's not really a conspiracy so much as the fact that politicians obviously have massive full time teams working to min-max elections, and it turns out that getting people really pissed at each other is apparently one of the best ways to do that.

[1] - https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/3599

These things actually are important, because regular people do have strong feelings about them, but they matter to elites only to the extent that they can be used to gin up votes without having to dissent on any of the things that they all agree on: killing lots of foreigners with expensive weapons systems, preventing anything resembling a realistic safety net, pro-capital/anti-labor tax and immigration policies, unlimited dark money in politics, etc.

First-past-the-post systems like the US make this particularly easy, since third parties have no chance. If policies like universal healthcare and non-interventionist foreign policy are simply never adopted by either party, voters are forced to make their voting choice based on things that at least are different between the two parties, and elites have arranged for these to be things that barely matter to them at all. They don't have to interact with our barely-there social safety net, worry about health insurance, send their sons to die in foreign wars, or tolerate any of the daily parade of indignities that constitute life for working people.

In short, it's good strategy to manipulate the poors with cheap rhetoric about the 2nd amendment, so that you don't have to have messy debates about expensive things the elites oppose, like universal healthcare.

Even if it's something like "10 hours of community service per week in exchange for basic income," contributing something to their tribe or society is an important part of a complete human being.

contribution can be made via arts and science, rather than making up pointless work or work the person cannot enjoy.

If we successfully decouple work from sustenance, I'm pretty sure there will be a non-negligable percentage of humans who would just take the basic income and passively consume. However, letting a person consume without any "skin in the game," I think would create a sense of entitlement among the bottom tiers, and resentment among the productive segments of society.

Also, there will still probably be a bunch of stuff that needs to get done cheaply (i.e. 100% automation is not practical), but not enough people want to do, like picking up trash, or cutting the grass, or sorting files at a courthouse.

I just don't see a world where everyone does exactly what they want to do at all times forever, unless we build personal VR universes for everyone.

Also, I've spent a good deal of time thinking recently about how to quantify art and other "indirect" contributions to society under a basic income system. Like if there's any work requirement, even if it's minimal, how much art qualifies? A couple of doodles? Could I just randomly scribble some blotches on canvas and call it a week of work? Could there be enough qualified art judges to determine if everyone who will inevitably try to phone it in has contributed "enough?"

I don't know. This came out kind of rambly, but there's a lot of non-binary, non-obvious aspects to basic income, and I've struggled to find answers to a lot of the questions I've come up with.

Ultimately, I agree with you. The system should support people contributing in the way the enjoy the most.

if you had to qualify your art with somebody to receive the benefit of the basic income, then it's not basic income. Art should be for art's sake - the artists themselves know if they are making art (they can't lie to themselves).

There should really be no obligation to work, and if those who don't feel like working (to produce anything, art included), they should be free _not_ to. Basic income should cover the bare minimum of living expenses. The incentive to work/produce should be an innate desire for more than the basic income. Society should encourage it, but not force it.

No, creating jobs out of nothing doesn't mean they are not creating value.

The man was sweeping the streets. Meaning the streets are cleaner.

Clean streets have value.

Also, people develop identity, integrity etc. from their jobs.

Or in Heinlein's words, re: citizenship:

"Under our system every voter and officeholder is a man who has demonstrated through voluntary and difficult service that he places the welfare of the group ahead of personal advantage."

In the scenario where we replace them with software that wealth travels upward instead of downward along the social and wealth ladder and you have citizens with nmidle hands.

Normally I would say investment in infrastructure is a good way to make that happen but China is no slouch in that regard either. They just have an unfathomable amount of people.

End of the day, our policy of exporting value from the United States will come home to roost. When I was a kid in the 90s, you worked at fast food or restaurants and often hung out there too. Now most of those jobs are filled by more easily exploitable immigrants, and slowly but surely those jobs are attriting away too.

Who will be buying stuff in 30 years?

It's very interesting point, but not just because abundant and cheap I think.

I was discuss a potential business model with my boss years ago for fun. It's about a breakfast deliver service. My point was, if we have enough data, then we can optimize the process so we can deliver all the breakfasts in the time window (to make sure people can get their breakfasts once they wake up in the morning, and the food itself is still in the "best by" time when they enjoying it)

My boss ask me back "Why would you think those delivery staffs cannot figure it out by themselves?"

Sometime we just forgot how flexible and intelligence human labors can be, and that level of flexible and intelligence is something current automation still can't bring to the real world.

There's still a lot of room for automation with human labor.

He's running two divisions, one employs experienced "ads buyers", one tries to tune models to catch up with the former. :P

China actually has labor shortages in certain places at certain times, yes, even for those factories. Also, wages have been going up, meaning labor is getting more expensive as surpluses are tapped out. It isn’t infinite, especially in 2018 compared to 1998.

Add on to that china’s coming demographic cliff, and automation is obviously going to have to make up the difference.

Revise the now defunct childbirth policy to lean the other way (ie social program to have more kids) and China can have a fertility spurt that can increase the size of the country by two or three US's in 2 generations. There's the labour to take care of the demographic cliff. They can also be ready work in healthcare to take care of the aging population in about 15-18 years.

Voila.

Many westerners are unhappy because globalization has caused a loss of manufacturing jobs. People elsewhere in the thread say that the Chinese government encourages using a lot of human labor in order to foster social order. Maybe so, or maybe they don't need to, because labor is so cheap anyway. Certainly the Japanese government does it, since labor is not cheap there.

But Western governments are more efficient. They don't have to make sure people have jobs: they can just tell people that those jobs went away because of automation, not globalization. People won't complain too much, they know they can't fight technology.

And that's where the misconception comes from. Basically in the West labor arbitrage rules over all.

I'm sure there's a 'rising tide raises all ships' element and the long term effects would have to be beneficial. But in the short term i wonder if there's a labor drain/golden handcuffs effect.

I asked our fixer what the story was, and it was similar to what's written here. If you want to use a machine, you have to buy the machine from the US. That's expensive, and people in China are cheap. Then you have to pay someone to run the machine, and that person costs 20x what the cheap labor does. Then when the machine breaks, you can't get anything done (and you have to pay someone even more expensive to fix it). When the cheap labor can no longer work, you just replace...them.

He said that the large companies got paid rebates for each person they hired (or something to that effect). It happens in tech, too. Not much in the way of build automation, but lots of people running around datacenters with DVD's and USB sticks.

In short, it keeps people busy and lessens the chance of uprisings (which is a thing in China).

Cheap labor also makes it much easier for independent businesses to open, which helps increase competition and keep prices low. In the US the fees you have to pay just to try to start a business would be more than enough to pay for months for labor. In the US you'll rarely find a middle class neighbor owning a business with a retail front, whereas in many parts of Asia it's quite common: low costs, though low profit.

Something I love, and hate, about Asia in general is you can walk into a store and suddenly you'll have half a dozen employees circling about trying to help. Since labor costs don't kill companies, they tend to be much less concerned about running on the bare minimum skeleton crew to keep things chugging along, and I think that's good for everybody. On the other hand that also has the dark side of the out of sight conditions that plague the bottom tier of employees. There's a give and take to all decisions.