Instead, perhaps UBI makes better sense. I know the economics part won't make sense until we're past the need for the current system, but if we don't need people to work, why have them waste their lives with suboptimal labor.
My biggest issue with UBI is that you'll probably just get millions watching Netflix all day. What would be awesome is if those millions were writing books, doing physics, or creating works of art instead. You'd have machines doing the labor and humans being freed up to focus on new contributions to society.
Of course, not to be elitist, but I'm not sure how many truck drivers will pick up work on the grand unified theory of physics, but if even one makes a new and important discovery that would be amazing. Also, I wonder how long until even jobs held by the highly educated (healthcare...etc) are largely automated?
There is a really easy solution to this that I have never seen suggested. Instead of giving money to everyone for free, why not raise the budgets of research and art institutions? You can get as many people as you want doing physics and making art as you want, all you have to do is give money to CERN.
Now, a pessimist might say that some people can't advance science or art because they lack the capability. I counter with the fact that anyone can do it at some speed, some are just faster than others. If you greatly increased the amount of money the Institute for Advanced Study had, they would be able to bring people on to their staff that were less efficient on a dollars per fundamental insight scale, I.E. you or me.
Is it a good idea to educate people who gets squeezed out of society? Sure. But most societies are going the opposite way even now. Like many other things it isn't a technical issue, but a social one. There isn't really a need to wait for society to collapse before giving people affordable access to housing, education, health care etc.
> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
-- Stephen Hawking ( https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/3nyn5i/science_ama... )
> The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.
-- Hannah Arendt
At the same time, it is worthwhile to decouple the problem of power from other problems - so that we can think clearly about how we might go about controlling power. This opens the possibility for solutions which would involve funding the arts and sciences. If we don't think clearly about both problems, we'll never be able to solve either.
If power can be made to represent community values, then it becomes possible to use Machine Learning and Robotics to provide all the basics for everyone. And it becomes possible to work on fixing the sustainability problem. So each of these needs to be examined and potential solutions to one impact the other. Things don't have to be the way that they currently are - we live in a time when extensive automation is possible for providing "basics".
Simplified, basics might cost $500 a month, but to live in New York you are paying maybe $5000 a month. The income isn't the problem, the cost of goods isn't the problem and the premium is the problem.
It doesn't really matter which way you do things unless you can remove the premium on success, progress, prosperity or whatever you want to call it. And if we do remove the premium we don't necessarily need these esoteric solutions.
Most, or at least many, people today already have money, it just doesn't go very far. So how is giving people a small amount of money going to change anything? It probably isn't, unless there is social change. Which the lack of is therefor the problem, not providing income as such.
For the record I do think a mixed market economy that keeps the cost of living in check and taxes automation is the most obvious answer. But Sweden already sort of tried that in the 1970's. Unsurprisingly very unpopular.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/sweden-social-democracy-m...
This also seems to ignore that research science itself is increasingly becoming automated, and such positions that are less efficient on the dollar per fundamental insight scale may disappear at around the same time as our hypothetical truck driver's.
Personally, I think that we as a culture need to change our thought processes on the necessity of everyone doing work. So what if some people just end up in the sitting around watching Netflix all the time category? Not everyone's going to do that, there are a ton of different outlets I would pursue if I didn't have to worry about working or money. And they're mostly things that I'm only money limited on because if I didn't work and pursued these things then I wouldn't be able to eat or have a place to sleep.
Work on giving people quality educations and the open-ended opportunities to explore, play, and pursue, and I think we'd all be surprised at what people will end up doing with their time.
They could work on automating their own jobs like software developers and engineers do. Or research for adverse effects of self-driving.
If you are already willing to pay someone's living expenses for the rest of their life, then there's no such thing as a gap due to not being remotely qualified. No how many years it takes for them to learn how to do research, if you are willing to pay the UBI, you are willing to pay their stipend for this time.
>such positions that are less efficient on the dollar per fundamental insight scale may disappear at around the same time as our hypothetical truck driver's
I think this rests on an incorrect view of human nature. People aren't born with a list of jobs that they can fit in to, they just have aptitudes for various things. In a purely capitalistic society, the aptitudes translate into a list of jobs because profit-seeking enterprises will not pay you more to do something than the net dollars you bring in - which is itself determined by your aptitude at that specific task. However, once we're talking about the UBI, this vanishes.
There does not exist a person that is capable of exactly washing beakers and driving trucks. This only appears to be the case because there do exist people who are capable exactly of turning a profit while washing beakers or driving trucks. There is a disturbing view of human capabilities running though this thread, that some people are just truck drivers "by nature," and that like the trucks themselves they must be retired if we no longer need their services. However, this "fact" is only a result of the financial realities that are specifically overturned by the UBI.
Another counter is that this may be caused by our current educational system. With UBI, it may make sense to employ e.g. 20-30% of all workers in education, to enable 1:1 tutoring for all students.
The amount of intelligence that constitutes gifted is an accident of history and economics. You can't divide people into those who can advance human knowledge and those who cannot, because everyone has some capability to do it. Presently there appears to be a "cut line" of competence that separates intellectuals from regular people, but that only exists because of economic forces that require us to limit the number of professional intellectuals. If budgets contracted the smart-ness of the average intellectual would rise as the lower performers were cut, and if budgets were expanded the smart-ness of the average intellectual would fall as hiring dug deeper into the baseline human population.
That wouldn’t be too different from the system today :( It would be a different set of people, sure. But it would actually be a net positive if this subset is smaller than the current subset (of people who don’t want to do x). I’d expect the number of people who are able to find their niche in arts, science, philosophy,etc would be quite large.
But now the machines are replacing service and mental labor. There is no where for a human to shift to this time.
As far as I know, computers on their own are not very good engineers, programmers, physicians, etc.
I also believe creativity in general is a kind of unsolved problem. The art/music computers made so far ... not worth mentioning. (except as awesome research projects)
The OP didn't say all jobs by 2030, it said 800M. Obviously there will still be lots of jobs, but not enough. Too many people unemployed and broke, combined with not enough of a social safety net for food, housing, and medical care, will result in social unrest and, if that's not dealt with well enough, it will progress to social breakdown, which either means a revolution (to institute a new government that does implement appropriate safety nets) or a martial-law type of scenario, neither of which is pretty.
Below-average doctors, engineers, and lawyers will be at risk of being out of work. On-site blue collar jobs are safer, as a percentage. Robots can prefab things in factories, but it will be a long time before automated robots can build or repair anything on-site with the efficiency of humans + power tools.
ETA:
I think you overestimate the number of people required to handle most of the problems you think need work. And the current free market doesn't agree that they need more work, or it would price those jobs higher and more people would jump into those labor pools. In some cases, the jobs require serious specialization (maybe not advanced degrees, but a fair amount of training) and not just anyone can do them... in which case even the optimal labor pool size would barely scratch the surface of the coming AI-caused unemployment crisis.
Even a massive public works effort to employ tens of millions of workers to deal with aging infrastructure, or to build green tech, is not a permanent solution. Most of those jobs would be gone in a decade, and then you're right back to where you started, only worse because AI will have gotten better.
Massive government spending (including on temp public works projects) is essentially UBI for a lot of able-bodied people. I don't object to that, but it needs to be limited to public works projects that are really necessary, and then you have to figure out where you're going to get the money to pay for them when the govt is already running trillion-dollar deficits. Is 5% debt inflation per year not good enough? Should we try 10%? 15%?
Thats the point. Robots are and will be for quite some time if not forever, pretty dumb amd needs human supervision for any complex task that cannot be encapsulated.
Also .. with climate change etc. etc. ... there is so much needed work to be done.
And population gets older ... and needs much more medical therapeuts, physicians etc.
So much pollution and garbage.
So much ugly things all around.
There is an endless amount of needed work around. And if the current economic system does not adjust for that, then there is something very wrong with that and not that robots doing shitty jobs.
Thats my point. I do not consider the current markets very free. Very distorted by many factors, but that is another topic.
"Most of those jobs would be gone in a decade, and then you're right back to where you started, "
That is probably the most optimistic asumption about what it takes to change the whole energy base of our current economy, I heard so far.
Anyway, even if: Space for example is huge. I see some (infinite) potential there. And on infinite other projects to make this world more beautiful instead of the opposite.
It is hard to replace someone like that, but you can make their work meaningless. You could e.g. make electrical wiring that is trivial to install and self-diagnoses. So now it is "Uber Electrician".