I do think the future should involve more automation, I just think we should be -- I dunno, a little less gleeful about it and think about the people it's impacting.
Tools to improve speed of development have existed for ages, twice the speed = twice less developers in a blunt way. (that includes even programming languages)
Personally I'd consider it an improvement - if I job can be automated, it should be.
Except that's not how that works. Increasing the productivity of a job does not eliminate it. A job is eliminated when it's no longer necessary.
Unless you live in a parallel dimension, we're both in the world where there's more and more software development being done every day. Twice the speed results in twice the output, not half the developers.
Of course it does. Not on an individual level, but if suddenly one employee can do three times more work, there is no need to recruit 2 more full time jobs to address the increasing needs. So on the whole, productivity will destroy jobs, but the good news is that the additional returns will create other jobs in other areas.
None of the advances in software development have eliminated software development. Hell, there are still job openings for COBOL developers. CI hasn't resulted in a whole swaths of people suddenly out of work because they were running tests by hand and now there's nothing else they can do.
Now, extend that to salaried positions. There is a certain amount of work that must happen. Tooling improves, devs become more idle, management consultant fires one (over time).
This has been somewhat negated only because the role of computers has been growing quickly and outpacing the growth in efficiency. That will change at some point. As you said, there won't be a case where swathes of people are suddenly out of work, it will be gradual.
A guy I know is an economist and does consulting for factories to optimize production. He has talked about how some areas these days have removed large groups of humans and replaced them with single humans observing machines. Eventually, development could reach a similar place.
In some cases, if productivity increases, and the price performance follows, we will consume far more of a thing, growing the market and employing more people.
If manufacturing cigarettes gets more/less expensive, people will pay more/less for their cigarettes. If it takes fewer people to make cigarettes, fewer people will have jobs making cigarettes. The number of cigarettes smoked stays constant.
If you have more lawyers, you'll have more lawsuits, contracts and legal letters. If it gets easier to do contracts or lawsuits lawyers will take longer lunches. Lawyer fees stay constant.
I think you mean half fewer developers, not “twice less”, but...
No, twice the speed means twice the value produced per unit labor, which means at the same labor price level, more, not fewer, programmers will be hired (or, at constant employment level, pay should increase); the actual result is some increase in pay and some increase in employment.
Technology that provides output multipliers on a job are different than technology that replaces the function of workers at lower cost.
But what if it's not ?
That said, the long term effect hasn't been to reduce jobs. Ultimately, not paying someone to do X ends up also creating jobs by freeing up money to pay someone to do Y.
Obviously that's small solace for someone who lost their job and isn't finding a new one. But we can frame the story in different ways that allow us to find different places to place the blame, and different ways to find alternative solutions. I personally don't like blaming technology because that implies that the best solution is to slow or halt the development of any technology that automates or eliminates the need for things that could be done by humans. As a human who enjoys eating out at restaurants and having access to high-quality medical care, and does not enjoy mowing wheat with a scythe and re-thatching his own roof, I'm not fond of that framing. As someone who dislikes memes that assume that learning is something that ends in your 20s, or that the world is teeming with people who have 6 years' experience in 3 year old technologies, I'm much more interested in looking for framings that look to improve everyone's access to new jobs instead of trying to preserve the old ones.
Technology changes so much that half of all programming jobs that exist today will be gone in 10 years. Some new ones will be created though.
The scary thing to me though, is if industry truely embraces open source/block chain. We could get into a state where most software is open... and fixing it is a bounty system, then 20% of programmers would make 80% of the money as they build AI to indentify opportunities, and solutions.
And, ok, it's good to have those studies, but they're not a final word on the topic. We also know that people who are displaced into other industries mid-career generally see permanent setbacks in wages, are frequently forced to move, and take long-term hits to their emotional wellbeing comparable to other major life crises.
If automation is 'just' accelerating the sort of turnover that's always existed, that still implies we should be deeply concerned and start finding better ways to support the people it affects.
They are quite different than college-educated hippies who would rather get more education and go surfing for a few years while they write bad poetry.
I mean imagine living in a rural, middle-of-nowhere US town where everyone pretty much lives on $800/mo from the government. What would you do out there? Would you care about high school if it's totally okay to not do anything? Maybe you'd go off to college, but then come back when it gets hard because it's totally okay if you never amount to anything. I would probably just spend my life on the internet and playing games while feeling guilty. Others would escape through drugs.
It is possible to change our culture and attitudes to work, but that's a really big change.
I would say, it's totally okay for any person, in rural US or urban, to not go to college if they don't need it. I am a huge proponent of higher ed, including making it freely available to all, but this idea that you have to go to college to "amount to something" is damaging.
Additionally, your use of "amount to something" is showing your own bias towards feeling that white-collar work defines success in life. Not everyone feels like this -- as you've noted, but it's not limited to "college-educated hippies." I know many, many people who work solely to put food on the table and find their fulfillment elsewhere. This could be via volunteering, art (not only hippie art), mentoring others, or pursuing dream jobs in their free time. Imagine if the safety net of UBI existed -- how many more people would feel confident taking the risk to open the restaurant they've always dreamed of opening, or art gallery, or other cottage-industry?
Furthermore, It's not about preventing people from working if they want to. It's about ending minimum-wage slavery -- making sure people don't need to work two or three minimum wage jobs just so their children have food to eat and a roof over their heads.
> I would probably just spend my life on the internet and playing games while feeling guilty.
You say this, but I kind of doubt it. That guilt would spur you to do something of value.
> Others would escape through drugs.
There is currently an epidemic of drug use in the US due to all the people trying to escape from the misery of their $7.25/hour existences.
These people can still let work define themselves, with less competition and more responsibilities which would make them more happy.
> Would you care about high school if it's totally okay to not do anything? Maybe you'd go off to college, but then come back when it gets hard because it's totally okay if you never amount to anything.
I think this is totally okay. Every time there is a topic on college there is the debate of whether college should be job training or overall growth of individuals. This solves that problem altogether and all the way to high schools. Also, when those people enjoyed enough of their free time and want to go back and learn, they will be able to do so without pressure. We cram 12-16 years of school on kids because most of them can't afford to not to. We already see middle class and wealthy children taking gap years to explore life, this just let everyone do that.
> I would probably just spend my life on the internet and playing games while feeling guilty.
Do you spend all your time on the internet and play games after work? If you don't, why would you when you don't have to work?
> Others would escape through drugs.
I'd say more people escape through drugs due to pressure in life than the lack of pressure.
Where I disagree with you, however, is the assumption that finding life meaning and purpose and a sense of usefulness and competency and enjoyment out of work is a thing limited to specifically today's culture, a thing that we can just change. For one, most people don't have the introspection and willpower to self-actualize and create their own meaning in life. This is a huge reason we have depression and nihilism and existential dispair. Two, we have stories from history and interactions from other cultures that show that finding meaning in work holds true for them as well.
For example, unless currently possessed by a Strange Mood (in Dwarf Fortress artifact making sense), it takes me 4 free days to even start (or resume) something productive more complex than general housework stuff. That excludes most of weekends out, since they are too short.
People who would have trouble finding valuable (to them) things to do under UBI regime, have even more trouble now, unless they lucked out and consider the job they must do now to be more valuable than the money it brings. And not a soul sucking waste of time that doesn't leave enough time and energy to even realize something fulfilling can be done.
My original comment somewhat lacked empathy, perhaps because I don't suffer from problems with free time fragmentation because I'm always possessed by a Strange Mood. I still think my point stands though. I meet a lot of people with what I know to be fairly large chunks of time that don't do anything with them anyway, not because they feel like they can't achieve something in that time but because they don't have any hobbies or ideas, or particular skills. In fact, that's true for most people I meet, and it's actually difficult for me to tell whether that's an artifact of perceived free time fragmentation or not. And this is in a culture where people are 100% encouraged to develop skills and hobbies.
But think about it, as much as we hear about retired people doing epic things, we also don't hear about retired people, like my grandparents, being terminally bored and ending up back to the workforce.
Here's the thing. As much as jobs can be boring and soul-sucking, to an extent they provide more of something then doing nothing while on UBI does. In addition, they provide a lot of training for life, like perseverance through boring things, and people skills (this is my experience at least) that you can't really get anywhere else. Plus, while jobs might be unfun, developing any kind of skill and competency at something genuinely gives people a sense of self-worth. Often, jobs provide the sort of skill that is easier to master than, say, art or poetry. Unless UBI comes with some sort of education or structured skill development, it really won't be good for people in the way you're suggesting.
I'm willing to consider it possible however that there might be more people capable of learning skills and achieving self-actualization than we currently see manifest in society, and that with UBI those people will be freed up to do things. I just don't think that it's a totally positive thing. Besides all kinds of other logistical issues and issues like it ending up subsidizing drug addictions and such.
But the main premise of UBI is that you just don't need economic output from all the people you have. So the only question remaining is how it would affect those people, the ones lacking the drive and ability to become useful. That is not the question of societal judgment -- if UBI ends up funding lots of mindless candy crashing it is only bad insofar as it affects the person. If they are satisfied, that's the end of the question.
I agree that a sudden transition for people who worked whole life and are finding themselves in effective retirement might be harsh, but the alternative here is sudden job loss and poverty, which is more immediately dire.
Might be a question to be resolved with data and studies I suppose. But my expectation (given that you don't need people to be economically productive anymore) is that benefit of having free time will be positive on balance, and the negative outcomes would be just another logistical challenge of education and motivation.
Consider also all the people in golden chains, who had ability and drive (which is arguably just another form of ability) to get good jobs, but who would rather apply those talents to something else.
Keep in mind that (quoting a random UBI plan that seems fairly representative), a universal payment of $12,000 per year to each adult U.S. resident over age 18 would cost roughly $3 trillion per year... And according to the IRS, in 2016 people payed a total of $1.4 trillion in taxes[1] meaning we'd have to triple current taxes. Even taxing the top 1% at 100% income tax wouldn't pay for that.
[1]: https://taxfoundation.org/summary-latest-federal-income-tax-...
Also, there are some studies recently started concerning UBI, so we'll see.
The other thing is that that money isn't free, it has to be taken from someone, and given to someone else... So the question is, why do the people receiving that money deserve it? If UBI is an almost entirely good force, and isn't mostly just wasted, then maybe it's worth considering, but even then the amount of money needed and morality of it is iffy. Without the garuntee that it would do anything good, I'm even more dubious of it.
I disagree with your assumption about education. A lot of people take pride in their knowledge. Most great scientists throughout history were basically trust fund babies. That's how they could afford to not work in a field and instead get educated and study science.
I want us to look at this the way we look at the invention of agriculture and not some dystopia where everyone is living in a slum. Agriculture freed up a lot of people from worrying about finding food. Do you think they were against growing grain and lost their sense of purpose because they didn't have to spend days running down deer? I seriously doubt it. This then led to people specializing in other fields. We see people becoming masons and building grand structures. Moving from militias to standing armies. Studying the stars leading to the ability to navigate the oceans. I think it's going to free up a lot of people who would have other wise been minimum wage indentured servants to have the ability to study and become great scientists or writers or doctors or whatever. Who knows how many great minds were wasted toiling away as a serf to some lord.
It frees companies to only hire people who are interested in what the company is doing and enthusiastic about it.
It frees people to do constructive, contributing things they might want to do, but which wouldn't pay enough, or which they wouldn't be able to do full time but can do part time.
Secondly, you can't actually redistribute GDP. You could (in theory) take 100% of the profits of all businesses, that would add up to about 12% of GDP:
https://static.seekingalpha.com/uploads/2018/8/30/saupload_B...
Notice the drop around 2008? That's what happens when a lot of debt can't be serviced anymore.
Lastly, "society as a whole" doesn't contribute to anyone's success. Just because you are a member of society doesn't automatically imply you have done anything for anyone. If I was offered a UBI on an Amazon's worker's salary, I would just retire, or at least drastically reduce my workload. A lot of my money goes towards my retirement anyway, so why bother?
This is entirely different from a "subsistence UBI", which I do support in principle.
For the rest of your tax money, there are concrete places that those are going to and if you don't like them, we can altogether as a society do something about it. And guess what, with UBI people will have a lot more time and freedom to spend on actually participating in politics.
Sure, in the end it might bumps it up from 1/3 to 1/2 maybe, but you are getting a lot of that back anyway as UBI to yourself. Even at 1/2 I don't think its unfair.
And of course, $600/mo/adult is an extremely meager existence.
Well the good news is that once UBI is implemented all future elections will boil down to politicians promising a bigger UBI increase than the other guy. Problem solved!
The numbers are similar for other western economies.
Okay...
> ... add extra money from increased taxes (make it flat 50-60%)
No. You can't presume anything about increased revenue from extra taxes. If you taxed income for any amount of work at 50% and you give every "household" 42,000€ (which I assume is livable in NL) you would drastically reduce the incentive to work and pay taxes, so your actual tax revenue goes down.
> The numbers are similar for other western economies.
The numbers generally say that if you pool all the social spending, you can redistribute it to everyone and it will pay for a subsistence level of living. However, a big part of that pool is pensions, which are liabilities in proportion to the amount paid by the individual. A lot of pensioners would be subsidizing people who never paid into the system. That's the main problem.
Good luck passing a bill that raises my effective tax rate from 17% to 55%. Obviously if you take a whole lot more money from everyone else there will be more to hand out to others.
Also remember you counted in pensions into your budget, those are separate from taxes. So the net profit from working would be maybe 30% or less - ridiculous!
That is already about $21k per year per household.
If income tax was raised to 50% flat and you keep all the social security and single payer spending, your paycheck would net maybe 25% of your salary. Who works full time for 25 cents on the dollar when they can just retire?
So then people won't work full time, your tax revenue, your single payer money, your pension money, it all goes down. It can't pay for your UBI.
Even worse, all this spending you are talking about redistributing isn't even paid for today. It's funded by debt. With the boomers retiring, there are huge amounts of unfunded liabilities.
It may not be obvious to you, but what you are proposing is that we can just all sit back, work less, print money and everyone will be better off. It's a fantasy.
To be clear, I support a UBI, but one has to be very careful about the actual amount.
And limits/process on how/if it can be raised. Otherwise, it's likely to devolve into people literally voting themselves an ever-increasing share of money from the treasury...
If I'm to support UBI it would be a meager existence: enough that you can eat. Like socialism UBI need to account for eventually somebody needs to do something. Food needs to come from someplace, that means somebody had to work for it, and that somebody should get some reward for it.
San Francisco was recently reported to have 1 billionaire for every 11,600 residents [1]. Maybe we should start looking there.
1: https://m.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/billionaires-San-Franci...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billionaire
The answer? 2,754 people with a combined $9.2 trillion to their name.
In other words, half of US GDP, or one and a half years of UBI as proposed here. That assumes of course all the billionaires in the world can be "convinced" to give up all of their wealth for UBI in the US.
UBI haters somehow never fail to pretend as if no one has put an ounce of thought into how to pay for a proposal that intends on giving everyone free money.
Clever use of UBI also allows redoing many labour laws & protections because having UBI to fall back on will substantially improve the bargaining power of workers so they won't need the same protections.
* Sorry don't have a reference, seen this discussed a few places as common knowledge.
Googling: Amazon warehouse worker $14/hour. 2080 hours per year = $29K. US Adult population 252 million. Multiply: 7.4 Trillion. US GDP (2017) 19.4 Trillion. Taking only US citizen adults, the figure is still >90% of the above.
The other side of it is we are a consumer spending driven economy. If consumers, especially poor people, had more money they'd spend it (unlike say overpaid software engineers like me). We'd get a big boost in the economy. Just like reducing unpayable college loans will free up much more money for the economy.
Instead of thinking about the % of the gdp, think about tax revenue. It's 3.6 trillion a year. Tripling tax overhead to fund this new thing would actually hurt the economy, even I can see that.
For one, doing UBI in a single country will cause whole number of problems. Do you keep borders relatively open and recall Europe's migrant crisis as a cute little inconvenience, or do you close them shut deal with political consequences of that -- generally people who are for closing borders are also against taking personal hits to prop up others. (and dealing with that involves doubling down on nationalism and other ugly notions).
With a planetary government and mostly automated industrial base (that likely needs more power over individual countries than US federal government has over individual US states), it will probably work. Good luck getting there.
Or with most of the countries (by population) implementing comparable UBI regimes mostly at the same time. So we'll have to wait for at least China and India to catch up.
What proportion of bare metal system administrators is there left now that AWS/GCP/Azure has taken the world ? What proportion of people still work in C ? etc.
Programming is perhaps different because people expect from the start the floor to move under their feet, and try to stay ahead and keep learning new stuff constantly.
We could easily eliminate half of all programming jobs if we just stopped creating work for ourselves. As it stands, we're the gatekeepers, our work is so opaque that no outsider could accurately estimate how much time we are wasting.
Luckily for us, markets aren't very good at eliminating this kind of inefficiency, see "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber.
I thought everyone wanted these jobs to disappear because Amazon was like a sweatshop or something? Now that Amazon is getting rid of such tedious jobs people are complaining? You can't have it both ways.
As for "having it both ways", you're presenting a false dichotomy. You're implying that the society must: either 1) preserve the status quo that makes those people work in those conditions, or 2) eliminate those jobs in a fashion that makes it worse for those people. Those are not the only options.
This is not really a completely new situation that humanity has never faced before. Throughout our history, there have been numerous examples of undesirable jobs being so tightly entangled with the economy that getting rid of them is problematic.
A few examples that come to mind are cocaleros in places like Bolivia, sex tourism for pedophiles in places like Sri Lanka, or child labor just about everywhere. I think that -- despite the horrific lack of empathy present in some other comments -- we can assume most people would agree that these are things we need to get rid of. If you study the history of the efforts to do so, you will find that going about it in a ham-fisted way only makes things worse. Despite that, nobody will argue that the only alternative is to just preserve status quo.
Unemployment is still pretty low, so hopefully they were able to find something a little more fulfilling.
... If all the capital could be distributed.
Increasing wealth concentration in certain desirable areas where prices will continue to skyrocket because the people there can afford it (those that receive the most return on capital vs. those just working on return on their own labor). Meanwhile the majority of the population decays alongside them, but at a distance that can be kept by well paid security forces.
There is the possibility of some philanthropy, perhaps. Maybe even some government policies that help change this, but I'm not sure if those are the most likely outcomes.
I guess there's always the guillotine / riot approach to bring things into check if it gets really bad, but typically that requires some sort of middle class to get things going. We also have not seen this occur at large scale in places where this already happens on earth.
EDIT: Please do not mistake my use of the word "labor" and "capital" for me identifying as some form of communist. Those are actual terms used by reasonable people (including economists!) I'd say most students of history and present day sociology might agree that this is a possibility for how wealth manifests in the future given large scale automation and no public policy changes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
Actual trickle down economics is trickle up economics, so no shit it doesn't work. Let's just dump a bunch of water here at the mouth of the Amazon and watch it flow up into the Andes.
Or, stated with less emotional rhetoric: Funding 1$ to the wealthy returns 0.7$ to the economy. So, from 'there' nothing, because Bezos' pocket is keeping it.
So going solely by that figure, as long as the gain in efficiency from automating a job is > 42% it's a net positive for the economy? And that's even _if_ you assume 100% of the savings goes directly into the company owner's pockets and isn't simply being re-invested somewhere else.
No, because 1$ to a poor person is actually 1.12$ returned to the economy. It gets even bigger when you go into 1$ to education.
>And that's even _if_ you assume 100% of the savings goes directly into the company owner's pockets and isn't simply being re-invested somewhere else.
Well that's the thing. Even if you give money to wealthy people they're not going to invest more than a poor person will with it. A person in poverty has immediate needs to spend the money on where a wealthy person does not.
Okay, so >60% then, assuming the average worker at an Amazon warehouse meets your definition of "poor". Still a totally achievable figure.
> Even if you give money to wealthy people
We're not talking about _giving_ money to anyone here, we're talking about automation. Automation means efficiency gains for _Amazon_ (the corporation) not Bezos personally, so you can't just make the lazy assumption that 100% of any savings made by Amazon goes directly into Bezos' pockets (as egypturnash did earlier in this thread).
But even if you do make that ridiculous assumption, _and_ we assume your figures are correct, it still only takes a >60% efficiency gain for the economy to break even on the transaction, correct?
Furthermore, someone who is out of work as a result of automation will also be a loss in the broader economy (as they will need services, the government loses income tax where applicable). The math I assume gets very complicated very quickly. But claiming "and from bezos' pocket, where?" is a reductionist statement that can be met with an equally reductionist "nowhere because we know rich people don't invest as much in the economy as they take".
There are also numerous other economic effects to consider, such as the increased activity from capital spending on automation equipment and software, and (as you pointed out) the economic losses from higher short-term unemployment.
My initial question was only made in reply to a reductionist and intellectually lazy statement implying that the company owner is the only one who benefits from automation. I asked that question in an attempt to get the other commenter to think more carefully about their position (the answer isn't "nowhere" by the way, as the very figures you yourself provided indicate that 70% of it goes directly back into the economy). Unfortunately it doesn't look like they ever replied, but nonetheless I think I've made my point.
I think if that money were to be spent by 10,000 people buying everyday groceries, cars, clothing the economic benefit would be far greater.
But don't worry, nobody needs to get paid for this. The rockets will be built by robots, and the robots will be built by more robots.
Do I really think Bezos will do this? No.
Would I be surprised if he did? Also no.
Well, nowhere except fighting attempts to do things like “make big businesses pay their fair share of taxes for once”.
Snark aside, automating shitty jobs is a Good Thing. Finding new and better jobs for those impacted should be a major political priority. Education is one aspect, but comes too late for those already on the workforce.
Places like Japan keep unemployment low by having many low skill jobs, like mall greeters and whatnot. This may be better than unemployment, but is possibly not the best use of human versatilty..
An interesting aspect is that those jobs are low technical skill, but can require good to very good social skills to be done well.
Without joking, greeting an elderly entering a bank and guiding them to the section they needs to go, explain briefly what they need to do, is can be non trivial.
What you’re saying would be similar to saying a warehouse worker might be low in technical skill but high in strength skill, which just misses the point that people refer to low skill jobs as jobs that require little education or specialization.
Are you revering to the stock market? I don‘t believe this is true. Just because half of adults own stock doesnt mean they own a good portion of these companies. Remember the richest 1% own 35% of the wealth.
What else would I be referring to?
> Just because half of adults own stock doesnt mean they own a good portion of these companies
Most people invest in mutual funds, which do own a significant portion of the largest corporations. This is fine; most communist systems in practice allow for private ownership of smaller businesses.
> Remember the richest 1% own 35% of the wealth.
This is true, but communism refers to the communal ownership of the means of production. In practice, communist societies typically end up with some small group of people having an outsized influence on the means of production. Although nominally, they own an equal share of them, this is in name only. By all metrics of control, they own a larger share. My guess is that the US (and free market systems in general with widespread ownership) is probably more egalitarian in that regard.
The capital is already distributed, to international shareholders.
Amazon's warehouse workers were abused because Amazon, not because those jobs should have been automated. They could have had more break time. They could have had lower targets. Pay them more. Paternity leave. So many things you can do to improve working conditions.
Why, if Amazon can replace them by robots?
I have no love for retail —it was my Saturday job growing up— but it does employ a huge pile of people, from warehousing through to the shop floor. As consumers, we bitch and whine about the cost this adds, and the hassle of mooching into a busy town to go and get something... So we sit back and use Amazon instead.
This is killing retail and it could also kill off manual warehousing. Retail employment in the UK us 10% of the workforce.
So what happens when Amazon replaces them too? Fewer and fewer jobs for unskilled workers. Across the board. Much more desperate people. Much more abuse.
And I say this as someone who absolutely loves all this kind of automation.
That said, I don't necessarily believe "society is slow to catch up" should be a long term problem. It should be something the government mandates for x years -- so that it has a timeline to get its act together and build society towards the future.
Be careful what you wish for. Social Security was supposed to be temporary too, but here we are, 50 years later. As Milton Friedman put it:
> Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.
I first heard this proposal from Bill Gates. Suffice to say he's got a unique view and has probably studied this extensively.
be careful what you wish for, automating manual labor jobs just pushes the value of such labor lower which can further put these people behind. as labor costs rise automation will continue to push people into positions that are not easily automated or the cost doesn't suit them but I doubt the workers will always be better off.
unlike industrialization we are not bring people in to do new jobs but instead displacing people this go around. so the real work that needs to be done is to find jobs that we can train people for that have some longevity fully taking into account that many may not be able to train to do them
As a society we need to find a balance between the firm and the worker. Automating jobs away isn’t always good or always bad. But unilaterally automating workers out and them not getting something in return is bad for the worker.