It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed.

Of course, in the current setup, this is true, but there are so many boring and hard jobs (worked by people who are yet poor) that we shouldn't mourn once we manage to get rid of them.

I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.

> I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.

In such an economy there's no incentive to work on further automation. In particular if there's a part of world where profits aren't distributed evenly - the innovation and manufacturing will move there.

It’s a question of implementation. Consider say a 10% dividend on the economy, in the US that’s 6,300$ per year per person. Which does not sound like much to live on, but historically represents a significant income. Not that the US would adopt such a system, but it could by cutting back other spending like social programs.

A tiny group might try to live in it, but more would see seasonal jobs as enough. As automation improves in general people would work less over their lifetime. Critically this would likely slow down the economy in the short term, but the constant minor labor shortage would presumably push for ever more automation to offset this.

Unfortunately, it needs to be a pay go system based on a fixed economic percentage to really work. But, assuming it was the general population would suddenly have a huge incentive to promote automation and economic growth.

10% of billions of dollars is plenty enough to cause the companies to move to some tax heaven. You can fight that with tariffs, but the end game is being outproduced by orders of magnitude and losing any influence over global market.

Apparently we can win the cold war, but can't sort out tax accounts of a coffee company. Starbucks can report record profits to wallstreet, and losses to the exchequer in the same month.

Read about industrialisation of United States and history of tarrifs. US had plenty of them when the British Empire was the industrial powerhouse.

Automation goes beyond manufacturing. Even a simile spell checker saves a lot of time over doing it manually.

That said, labor has been cheaper outside the US for decades, yet manufacturing is still 2+ Trillion dollars per year in the US. In part it’s because you can’t simply move farms, oil wells, or forests etc. But, business friendly regulations, educated workers, efficient transportation, etc are also huge contributors.

Haven

You'll eventually get someone that improves it for its own sake and wants to learn for the sake of learning.

And you end up with foss software ux :) Some incentive and "chore" work is needed to polish rough edges.

>In such an economy there's no incentive to work on further automation.

And no need if the work on further automation is automated.

Bingo! The runaway feedback loop driving the singularity (which was John von Neumann's idea originally FWIW.)

Why not?

What's the incentive for millions of people working for free on open source projects?

I think there's an intrinsic human drive to be useful. It makes sense evolutionarily: the tribe can't kick you out if they rely on you for something. It's no guarantee of safety or success, but it's a bargaining chip.

Kevin Simler (via Dennett) goes as far as modeling this phenomenon on the level of individual neurons [0]: that conditions like depression and grief can be thought of as neurons and their networks becoming suddenly obsolete, and casting about trying to find new ways to be useful.

The employment model is hardly perfect; if anything, it has an uncomfortably feudal flavor in practice, where one is a thrall/vassal for 40(+) hours/week, in exchange for autonomy the other 128(-); and where one has the option to seek a new lord if sufficiently dissatisfied. There are countless other ways to be/feel useful outside that model: entrepreneurship, non-profit/community work, raising children, passion projects.

There are also potential perverse incentives: in particular, to maximize the problem one purports to solve. The most obvious parallels are the military- and prison-industrial complexes; planned obsolescence is another milder example. It's easy for unions to tip from collective bargaining into protectionism of industries that we'd like to become obsolete (prison guards, coal miners), out of a very understandable desire for those individuals to not lose their social bargaining chips.

So I do think we should celebrate the idea of "employment", as such, becoming optional; I strongly favor UBI. But at the same time, we need to be thinking about new institutions and proactive strategies for people to be, and feel, useful. I dare say, in some cases we want to be spending the economic surplus from the efficiency of automation, on intentionally inefficient pro-social economic activity. One example might be a community garden: it's a safe bet that industrial agriculture will always be an order of magnitude more efficient at producing food; but the community garden has other benefits, of connecting humans to nature and to each other (and perhaps a bit of resilience against supply chain disruption).

[0] https://meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/

Yes, "Let the robots do the work and we'll take their pay."

Bucky Fuller pointed out that we could apply technology to solve our problems efficiently and wind up with a two-year career. You would work for about two years and that pays for the rest of your life, you can retire or do whatever.

(FWIW, this is the context within which I think UBI makes sense, and we are not there just yet.)

Really it's a choice (at least in theory, maybe we are strapped in but I like to think we can affect things at least a little.) We can't un-invent the transistor.

> wind up with a two-year career. You would work for about two years and that pays for the rest of your life, you can retire or do whatever.

True expertise in fields like medicine, engineering etc. generally takes at least a decade of experience to acquire. Societies need for, and ability to utilize, such highly skilled labor is only increasing as we automate simpler tasks.

People who never aspire to such professions might be spared long working years, but some portion of people will need to put in the long hours and years to keep the lights on.

> True expertise in fields like medicine, engineering etc. generally takes at least a decade of experience to acquire.

Oh I agree.

In the absence of a profit motive those fields would be taken up by the most dedicated, eh?

> Societies need for, and ability to utilize, such highly skilled labor is only increasing as we automate simpler tasks.

Again I agree. I think that one obvious benefit of automation is that it frees up humans for important things that only humans can do. Mark Miller has an adage "Moore's law means that humans are becoming exponentially more valuable from the CPU's POV."

We're not talking about forcing people to retire after two years. We're talking about eliminating drudgery and wasteful processes.

> some portion of people will need to put in the long hours and years to keep the lights on.

No, that's the whole point: no one has to put in long hours anymore thanks to the knock-on effects of the invention of the transistor.

Just like farming went from ~90% of the population to ~3%, so will our industrial space-age civilization, if we let it.

> It really makes me sad that jobs are seen as inherently valuable. The way you phrase it, 'provide jobs', feels like jobs are something needed.

If I had to guess, you have a job, so it's fun for you to sit here and make these comments from your high horse.

I don't see what high horse you are talking about. The point is that having to work in order to survive is not inherently a desirable situation for a human to be in. A more desirable situation is to have your needs such as housing, food and healthcare already taken care of irrespective of what you spend your time on. Historically such a life has been possible for a select few in the aristocracy, and they seem to have had a great time - usually at the expense of serfs, slaves or other less privileged classes. Hopefully, eventually we'll all be able to live a life like that, with robots or software instead of slaves. So when someone says that we shouldn't consider jobs to be inherently valuable, they are pointing out that what is valuable is not our labor, but the fruit of our labor. That we should seek to improve results rather than effort. 150 years ago, ~70% of the population in western countries needed to work in agriculture to ensure the food supply - today it's less than 5%, and that's great! So yes, currently human work is still needed to keep society running, and for that reason we have created social norms around it being ethical to work and unethical not to, in order to get everyone to pitch in. But the truth is that there is nothing inherently unethical about not working, as long is it's not at the expense of someone else having to work even harder. As such, if you want to put on the tin-foil-hat a bit, you might even consider that it could be that the class that already lives a life where they don't need to work - the upper class (who make their living by owning things) has over-sold this whole notion of 'work == good' to the middle class (who make their living by working) in order for them to feel better than the lower class (who are unemployed) and ensure any anger is directed downward and those two classes will fight it out instead of questioning the world order.

> A more desirable situation is to have your needs such as housing, food and healthcare already taken care of irrespective of what you spend your time on.

What you are describing is already a reality for our house pets. I don't find becoming a house pet to some AI/automated machine to be desirable in any way shape or form.

So you're saying the aristocracy were the pets of their slaves and serfs? Got it, thank you for adding to the debate.

> So you're saying...

> Got it, thank you for adding to the debate.

How about don't be such a dick?

You aren't addressing his main point.

The point is that the aristocracy did not engage in "work" as many would define it, but seemed to be pretty happy about that.

It worked for them. Why not for others?

Hey, there's no need to resort to name calling. You didn't address my main point, but instead just put up a strawman argument by equating the autonomy of not needing to work with the massive lack of autonomy that comes from being someone's pet, a perspective that my comment had already given a counterexample of with the aristocracy. So yes, I called out your comment for being a one-line, low effort, strawman argument, that didn't actually add to the debate by 1) actually addressing any of the points raised or 2) seriously making and backing up any points of its own. If you have something substantive to add, or any actual counterarguments, I'd genuinely love to hear them.

The length of your counter argument is enough to prove to me that your answer is complex and it's not straight forwards.

Go leave you job in 2020 and see how that goes for you. I understand "the dream" you're trying to describe, but it's 100% fictitious.

Just on the agriculture bit, do you even know where your food comes from or how it's produced? Honest question?

It doesn't makes a difference.

If I had a job I might not want to continue if it was undesirable, if it was desirable I would continue anyway.

If I didn't have a job I would still like my basic needs covered (living in a country with good social security means that that would actually be so), and if nobody else had to pick up my slack I'd want more than the basics.

And then I want that for everyone. Any of the situations given above is true for someone in my surroundings, colleagues, friends, neighbors.

My perspective is coloured by the country I live in of course. Nobody will be on the street, hungry or without healthcare if they lose their job here, there is plenty of annual leave by law. And it's great, I gladly pay taxes for that. But imagine, it could be even better!

Why do you think the question matters?

I don't think anyone inherently needs what we think of as jobs. What we actually need is a way to provide for our own and our families' livelihoods, and the currently in-fashion way to do this is with "jobs".

If everyone were magically able to live without jobs, some would still go off and do things productive out of an innate desire to be productive, but many wouldn't.

Try say this to someone without a job though? Because I'm pretty sure in this utopian idea of "I don't need a job because my basic needs will be met" is complete fantasy in 2020.

Millions have recently lost their jobs so I'm sure its' easy enough to find someone who can tell you how it feels.

>I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.

Not going to happen under capitalism.

Look at the numbers, they are pretty horrifying.

https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/images/wealth/Net_wor...

https://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/wealth.html

Do you think it has a chance of happening in Vietnam or North Korea under communism?

No, the parent poster does not have Vietnam, nor North Korea, nor even communism in mind.

You know this, and we know you know this.

Fair enough, so not capitalism, not communism.

What political system might be capable of meeting these requirements? Is it the political equivalent of unobtanium or vaporware?

Im not trying to be a smartass; I want to know what the answer might look like. It doesn’t have to be a treatise. Just something consistent with a chance at succeeding with non-ideal people.

> Fair enough, so not capitalism, not communism.

> What political system might be capable of meeting these requirements?

Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one.

Different political systems/policies combined with capitalism can produce very different societies and structures. For example, see social democratic systems in many parts of Europe.

> Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one.

“Capitalism” is not a full description of a national political system, but since it is fundamentally a system of legal property relations, it is exactly an aspect of a political system.

> For example, see social democratic systems in many parts of Europe.

Social democratic systems are not, even in the aspect of a political system which “capitalism” describes, purely capitalist but one of many forms of post-capitalist mixed-economy systems which retain elements of capitalist property relations but constrain them in various ways foreign to capitalism in the strict sense.

>Social democratic systems are not, even in the aspect of a political system which “capitalism” describes, purely capitalist

But then would it also not be fair to consider the US to also be such a mixed system. Not as equally mixed, but still mixed with behaviors that are post-capitalist?

Yeah, capitalism proper mostly died in the early-mid 20th Century, though there are political factions actively seeking a return to it.

>Capitalism isn't really a political system, even though people seem to elevate it to one.

It is you need a giant violent state to create a culture of sophisticated property rights. AKA capitalism requires a state and legal system, it doesn't exist without one. Things like copyright and Intellectual property are pure man made cultural political fictions, they do not exist in the natural animal kingdom.

How is it possible to own large tracts of land the size of small cities or entire provinces without a state/army to enforce it? AKA before populations got big there was plenty of "common" land that wasn't anyones. Property rights are a cultural invention.

Capitalism is the default system that evolves organically when free men and women create things of value and voluntarily exchange them with others. That's not to say it's perfect or 100% fair.

That's why you always hear communists and socialists talk about the need for a "revolution". No one ever talks about a capitalist revolution because people don't need to be coerced into voluntarily exchanging goods and services. They do, however, need to be coerced into giving up their wealth to some massive state who's self-appointed role is to decide "what's fair" and who does and does not get to receive wealth produced by others.

They may well be instances where the hard edges of capitalism need to be sanded down a bit with redistributive policies, but make no mistake, between socialism and capitalism, socialism requires a lot more force, state-backed violence, and coercion to make work.

Most countries run on fiat to exchange wealth. Fiat already takes a huge leap of faith in the state issuing it. To think that the current economy is anything like barter is bogus. There is too much blind trust that the current economy is more fair than not, which leads to "fiat wealth" = "human worth" thinking, while money leaks like a sieve to entrenched interests.

If you're saying that there isn't a "pure capitalist" system in existence today, that's true. I think we mostly agree in our points, even if we're coming at it a bit differently. Crony capitalism, as practiced in most developed countries today, shares a lot of the same bad outcomes seen in socialist systems. Namely, you have a large state with a monopoly on violence, using its considerable power to pick winners and losers, often in a way that is not based on the value created by groups or individuals, but rather the political power and influence of those groups or individuals.

The answer to this is not to double down and give the state even more power to pick winners and losers, thinking that "this time will be different" or "we just need to get the smartest most moral people into power".

Barter is "natural", but so is tribalism/centralized governance, and monopolistic practices. Yes, it does have to be "we'll do it better/smarter this time" for both governance and the market-based economy(not "free market"). Thinking that dismantling it all and allowing "free" organic growth won't lead right back entrenched interests and gatekeepers within the government and market is naive.

I rather think that feudalism is the default system. Power begets power, so in the absence of some sort of check on runaway power accumulation i.e. a government, "free markets" are quickly replaced by "do what I say or I'll have my minions kill you".

This is like a whole giant blob of assumptions and cultural bias. The only thing thats natural is law of the jungle, and the wish of the strongest. Otherwise known as the monarchy.

No need for a capitalist revolution? Did the monarchy give up power willingly? The french revolution, the american revolution, etc.

The only 'freedom' that exists in the natural world is the law of the jungle. You want freedom but want to live in a society? The idea of police and public prosecution, of justice and judges are all recent inventions. Without them, what stops me from taking whatever is yours and assures your freedom. How do you even come into possesion of land, water or any resource in the natural world?

Apparently some people's idea of freedom means they can wonder around the city spreading deadly disease. I would very much like freedom from them coughing in my vicinity and infecting me.

Some people think they have freedom to shoot me in the face if they feel 'scared', while i value freedom from getting shot.

Some people believ they have freedom to pollute the air with sulphur oxide, while i believe they should have to pay the cost it takes to clean up their pollution.

Any freedom for you is an obligation on me, and vice versa.

I don't think I ever claimed that the U.S. in it's current form is a pure capitalist system (or even close to it) and I think you're deliberately taking the first sentence of my comment out of context.

That being said, I don't think we're disagreeing here or at least not entirely. I'm saying that the state can't be trusted to manage the economy and distribution of wealth because it is prone to corruption and favoritism leading to bad outcomes. You seem to be arguing a similar point.

As long as people have to do things with land and resources there has to be a way to enforce use.

It’s not like collectivism or communism or anything else allows interlopers to seize things willy nilly.

Peasants in Cuba or the Soviet Union couldn’t just squat on land and do as they pleased. The kulaks are a good testament to what happens in those circumstances.

Kulas are not quite the same thing.

Common land used to be a thing, you could graze your animals there, etc. https://www.gov.uk/common-land-village-greens

Today, air and seawater are common resources that are being taken willi nilly and polluted

We have that thing in Europe called socialism, it brought us paid vacations, public health care, paid parental leaves, paid sick leaves, less working hours, &c. In a way all these things are wealth redistribution.

It's actually funny to listen to political debates of the 60s and 70s because people were planning that if automation were properly handled we'd be working like 2 days a week while keeping our standards of life and retiring at 40. What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c.

By the way, you might want to reassess your way of starting conversations, you're definitely trying to be a smartass. There are answers all over the place if you're willing to search/read a bit, it's not like these societal issues are new, there are literally hundreds of books about this very topic.

No country in modern Europe is Socialist. It's all Liberal Welfare State Capitalism.

And the Welfare State was created to avoid Socialism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_von_Bismarck

> A master of complex politics at home, Bismarck created the first welfare state in the modern world, with the goal of gaining working class support that might otherwise go to his Socialist enemies.

European society is based on capitalism. It is disingenuous to claim it is based on socialism. And regardless, income inequality is also a problem in Europe.

The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one. Adding a bit more wealth distribution just means tweaking the system, rather than creating a new one, which is what the parent poster implied was needed.

Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c."

> European society is based on capitalism. It is disingenuous to claim it is based on socialism.

It is, but it's also very heavily influenced by socialism. You, and many other people, seem to believe it's and "either or" question when it really isn't and it never has been...

> The person you are replying to was making the obvious point that noone knows a better system than the current one

What does that even mean ? the current "one" ? Since when there is only one ? Just compare the US and French or German systems they're extremely different, especially for the average workers.

> rather than creating a new one

Come on, we're not talking JS frameworks here, what kind of rhetoric is that. Nobody is talking about tearing down the whole thing and starting from scratch.

> Maybe you should try reading some of those hundreds of books, because you clearly haven't if you think "What happened is that the rich got richer and the poor have to work shittier and shittier jobs, work longer, retire later, &c."

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/07/global-ineq...

https://www.schroders.com/en/insights/economics/world-pensio...

Everything I can find talks about rising retirement age, lowering of pensions, and stagnation of purchasing power. If automation really brought what it was supposed to bring we would see much deeper _positive_ changes when comparing 1970s and 2020s. People got kicked out of factories and pushed into the tertiary sector but for all intent and purpose it's the same shitty working conditions, wages and social statuses. The guy who built cars for ford in the 50s is now driving a uber and has to pay his own insurances and pension, talk about the automation revolution ...

European society is based on rule of law, democracy, equality, the scientific method, the justice system, free public education and capitalism.

Capitalism existed for thousands of years (first company if the world was registered like yr. 700) and only supported miserable living standards. Most of these systems appears during / after the Renaissance, and deserve more credit for the society we have today than capitalism does

While I would agree they were very unlikely to have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, how does one draw the same conclusion about communism? I've met plenty of people who see communism, or at least a system of government that they would ascribe that label to even if others might not, as being a preferable alternative to capitalism. This leads me to think it is a reasonable assumption that they might have been thinking about communism, even if it is not the only possible reasonable assumption.

Not that it actually matters for the discussion, just for transparency - I am pretty open about the method.

As long as we all get to do less of the undesirable work, our needs are covered and the profits and power of automation are not concentrated in the hands of a few I'd say we reached the goal. 'Evenish' distribution might be sufficient too.

There is a lot of literature on ideas and theories about it. The systems used so far had a lot of debugging time already, and I'd expect unexpected effects to turn up when implementing anything new, and thus it is hard to advocate for any specific one. Working with our problematic traits (such as laziness, selfishness and hunger for power) instead of against them (or worse, ignoring them) seems advisable though.

> undesirable work

> our needs are covered

Human desires and human needs don't work the way you're probably thinking. I'd suggest to take into account Maslow's theory of human motivation. http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm

*less of the undesirable and more of the desirable work

is what I meant but did not specify. Is that more in line with what you mean?

Desirability is defined by the consequences the success brings, as opposed to the failure of inaction. It is a thing only in context of some unfulfilled needs.

How do you define desirability in the society where "needs are covered" (already)?

What would comprise the desirability if the profit of every action is alienated from the acting person?

Not all needs can just be covered by the economy, of course. You cannot make people respect or love someone. I was talking purely about basic physical needs such as enough varied good food and decent shelter. As your link says, 'Man is a perpetually wanting animal.'

I would say a desirable job is one with

- mostly pleasant tasks,

- good working conditions (not hard on the body (heavy lifting and bad positions, no natural light, noisy, bad air quality, ..) and mind (bad stress, bad social fit, ..),

- good relationships with the people around you, (and the ability to leave if they don't work for you)

- a good amount of agency (where 'good' might differ from person to person),

- achievable and worthwhile goals that do not feel like 'bullshit work', with a good feedback loop,

- and probably more I cannot think of off the top of my head right now.

(Respect and reward of other people is definitively a big plus, but if you yourself think your job is worthwhile it's probably enough to count as desirable.)

Most of these are not material rewards (though not having them can increase profit). If the only reason somebody does a specific job at all is money, the above conditions are not met/the person is not actively happy about doing it, and it can be done by a machine just as easily, I say we shouldn't have a need for this person to do it. Still, current society demands people have a job, any job, or even several, as a value in itself.

How the profit from work done is distributed is whole other (but connected) story. (Concerning your last question, I would argue that this disconnect to profit is already the case for many many people.)

Sorry for not writing clearly, this topic would probably warrant a seminar with lots of beer and reading at least.

Maybe they don't have Vietnam or North Korea in mind, but that's one possible end.

The comment "...distribute the profits evenly.Not going to happen under capitalism." strongly implies a communist or socialist solution to this very real issue around automation.

It's trendy to bring up socialist solutions and then re-label them or put the ever-cleansing phrase "democratic" in front. But it's important to note when talking about redistribution as a solve, that for every Sweden or Denmark, there's a Cuba or North Korea.

So tired of this old chestnut. Do yoy think the fact that Cuba and North Korea is a dictatorship maybe has some relevance to the fact that they are not nice places to live? There are plenty of capitalist dictatorships, are they great? Maybe thats the key differentiator?

Has communism been able to exist outside dictatorships? Or has it been unlucky in that regard and always attracted authoritarianism.

I guess the question would be, if given a chance to choose would people living in those regimes keep the economic system and reform government or would they vote for a different kind of system altogether?

Communism has never existed at all, lets start there.

Whether the dictators where honestly trying to create communism, or they were using it to fool the populace much the same as monarchs used religion, is debatable.

It appears that from their minutes and other notes and such that Soviet leaders truly believed what they were doing was communism. It wasn’t a case of them pretending and then in secret they’d laugh at the sham they were executing. No, they truly believed they were being marxists.

Capitalist countries can be free and open democracies or they can be brutal dictatorships, but they at least have a path to a free society if they so choose it.

A country where wealth is primarily controlled and distributed by state cannot, by definition, ever be free, even if the people doing the redistribution got elected at one point. That's simply mob rule with no respect or regard for the individual. Socialism or social democracy, or whatever you want to call it requires constant state coercion of individuals to work at all. This type of coercion may happen in capitalism systems like those in dictatorships, but it's not a built in requirement of the system itself.

There is no modern state without collectively funded education, police, fire service, justice system, military, reseach, environmental protection, FDA,FAA, etc.

So where is this magical line, once we cross it, the system suddently becomes oppressive?

The magic line would be when the majority of privately owned businesses are illegal.

Or, as the socialists would call it, when they take control of "the means of production".

Which is just another way of saying that private businesses are illegal.

Collectively funding some services has nothing to do with socialism.

If that's the magic line, then it's a thousand miles away.

I can't find a single country (maybe North Korea?) still in existence, that has outlawed private business. We aren't just talking social democracy, even Cuba and Venesuela allow private business.

> that has outlawed private business.

From my original comment: "the majority".

The examples you have given, have indeed outlawed many private businesses, in the past. Although, I agree that those countries have become significantly more capitalistic over the years.

You also skipped the most famous example of socialism, which was the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union absolutely banned almost all forms of private enterprise.

But sure, socialism has significantly decreased in relevancy over the last few decades, to the point where basically all old socialist countries are becoming more and more capitalistic. Socialism is dying, all throughout the world.

Also _when_ socialistic government allow some controlled capitalism (usually heavily regulated-meaning it applies to small business and not just your sulfur emoting power plants), they do it as a temporary concession on the way to complete abolition of private business.

Before Stalin forced the kulaks out of their farms Lenin allowed private farming as a means to an end. Stalin lost patience and forced it.

> Or, as the socialists would call it, when they take control of "the means of production".

> Which is just another way of saying that private businesses are illegal.

No, it's not. Private businesses executed through private labor applied to public capital which the business rents from the state are perfectly compatible with socialism in which private ownership of the means of production is prohibited.

It's true that there are “socialist” states and parties that have banned or sought to ban private business, but that's not essential to socialism.

Also, all of those collectively funded services listed upthread tend to feature public capital ownership of the means of delivering the service as well as public operating funds, and often exclude private ownership of some of the means of delivering those services and/or use of privately owned capital to provide the same service, resulting in a domain in which private capital ownership is restricted.

> private ownership of the means of production is prohibited.

This is a borderline semantic argument.

There is very little difference between banning almost all private businesses, and banning all owenership of private capital.

Everything that everyone does, relates to capital. If I write code, I just produced capital. And now the socialists are saying that I won't own that.

Yes, code is capital. The value of almost all software companies, is not in the server racks, it is in the code that they produced.

As far as I am concerned, banning all private ownership of capital, is only very slightly different than banning private enterprise, given that the main function of many private enterprises is to create capital, and now that capital would be illegal for them to own, even if they produced it.

> And now the socialists are saying that I won't own that.

Dude, the cold war is over, the communists are gone, noone is coming for your code. Every half-sensible discussion of modern socialism is not about taking away all of your stuff. I am really tired of this bait and switch social democracy for communism.

Einstein, Heinzenberg and many other scientists have advanced the whole human race, but you can't have IP on ideas and on laws of nature, and on scientific theories. So have they produced capital?

The discussion of IP is very nuanced, and raises question for why code is covered by overlapping patents and copyright, how long it should last, what rights does end user have and how right to repair is affected, etc.

Anyway, this thread has been massively derailed. It started with a bizzare slippery slope argument of "for every Finland there is a North Korea" as if social democracies are in danger of turning totalitarian any day.

> Dude, the cold war is over, the communists are gone

Correct, that is kind of my point. Socialists and communists are becoming more and more irrelevant in the modern era. That does not change the definition of what "The means of production" are though.

I am not too worried about socialists taking over. They lost, and aren't going to take back the means of production from anyone.

> is not about taking away all of your stuff

Well yeah. That is because they are no longer relevant, because of how significantly they lost, and because of how much capitalism has become the defacto government system, all around the world, even in many places that used to call themselves socialist.

If socialists want to redefine socialism to be actually be just capitalism, but with a slightly more expansive social safety net, with more free healthcare and government programs, I guess that is fine by me.

But I am not going to call that socialism.

> Socialists and communists are becoming more and more irrelevant in the modern era.

Leninists and their descendants might be; socialists aren't any more than capitalists are, as pretty much every advanced economy is some hybrid of the two. Because of the Cold War (by which point that was already largely true), it's become fashionable to call those mixed economies “capitalist”, that is not particularly accurate (though it comports well with Leninist propaganda.)

The capitalist state you are celebrating is grafting on increasingly more socialist elements. Stop thinking about the cold war and start thinking about the past 200 years. There didn't use to be public education, police, justice system, etc. This trend is going to continue.

I already said that if you want to redefine socialism as to be capitalism with a slightly bigger safety net, and some government funding of education/healthcare you can do that.

But I am not going to call that socialism.

That's just capitalism, with a slightly larger safety net.

You are expanding the definition of capitalism. Why is that expansion to be preferred over what you call expanding the definition of socialism? Especially since socialists defined both?

Sure, so I can explain why my definition is better, using an example that you gave.

You said that a reasonable definition of socialism was the following: "means you can't own those goods while renting labor"

This situation, is so far removed, so far out there, so far significantly different than the current state of the world, that it makes no sense at all to call the current state of the world "socialist".

The situation you gave, is far, far outside the norm of how the world currently works, and is borderline unimaginable as to how such a society would even look like.

But my situation, of "Capitalism countries put more money into existing social safety net programs" is easily immaginable. It require no restructuring of society. It merely requires a bit more money, being put into existing programs.

Or in other words, not much would change.

Wheras making it so "you can't own those goods while renting labor" would mean that basically every major company in the world would have to be shutdown or restructured. It is such a massive change, that I cannot even begin to guess as to what such a world would look like.

If you want to make up a new word, or something, that describes giving a bit more money to existing social safety net programs, go ahead.

But whatever you decide to call it, please do not pretend that it is any way similar to if people "can't own those goods while renting labor". The situations are so extremely different, that it makes no sense to describe them using the same word.

> This is a borderline semantic argument.

There's no borderline, once the issue was raised of, to paraphrase “what does the term ‘socialism’ encompass”, the discussion was inherently one of semantics.

But that hardly invalidates a response once the term of the discussion are set.

> There is very little difference between banning almost all private businesses, and banning all owenership of private capital.

There's a very big difference, especially in the way socialists (who established the term) define “capital” (the definition is used in finance within capitalist societies is broader, expanding the original by metaphor, and useful for its purpose within capitalist societies, but it's not what socialists seek to abolisg. The socialist use is strictly limited to the physical, non-financial means of production.)

> Everything that everyone does, relates to capital. If I write code, I just produced capital.

No, you didn't, as socialists define the term (whether or not private ownership of IP is recognized—on which socialist preferences may vary—IP is not capital in the socialist sense, being decidedly non-physical.)

> As far as I am concerned, banning all private ownership of capital, is only very slightly different than banning private enterprise, given that the main function of many private enterprises is to create capital.

Again, no, what in capitalists societies are called “capital goods” are not capital in the socialist sense until and except as they are used as means of production. Socialism doesn't mean you can't own capital goods, it means you can't own those goods while renting labor to apply to them in the course of production (and many schools of socialism have a principled carve out for means of production to which the owners own labor exclusively is applied, the prohibition is most centrally about the separated relationship between labor and capital, which does not exist in that case.)

And this is all strict-sense socialism, which much modern developed-world socialism is decidedly not, being largely instead mixed economy ideology with a preference for more restraints on the power of capital owners over others in society than the dominant status quo in modern mixed economies. Your precious code and capital goods are even more safe there.

> means you can't own those goods while renting labor

And this is only slightly different than banning all private enterprises.

I do not consider "you can own some capital, but only if you are a single person, and you can't purchase labor from others for your business" to be significantly different than the slightly more extreme situation of banning all private enterprises.

They do tend to start looking for easy targets to justify getting their paycheck, zeroing in on minorities and the poor.

FWIW my takeaway is that underfunding a whole class of people, especially when it comes to education and healthcare, so they have a much harder time succeeding in the job market and tend to die or go bankrupt if they get sick, is a really bad idea.

I think perhaps you thought I was making a comment about black Americans. I was not. I added some clarification to my comment.

Unearned income is unfulfilling and the people who think they earned it resent it being taken from them, even if it's only particularly large because there's a big market to sell into and a big winner effect in the market structure.

I don't know the answers here but they don't look like free market capitalism or redistributive socialist utopia, and actually I think this axis or spectrum is an actively harmful frame for constructing a society with fulfilling lives and less inequality. Neither more government nor more free enterprise is quite right.

People want to live productive lives where they are valued and make a difference. How do you do that in a society which has such enormous returns on capital which alienates people from their work product?

If unearned income is unfulfilling, we should raise the estate tax, why should the children of the poor be so blessed to need to work while the children of millionaires and billionaires be saddled with the curse of ennui?

You might think you're being facetious, but many wealthy people don't want their children's lives to be wasted on consumption, and so limit their inheritance: enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing.

The most meaning in life comes from doing things for other people - not necessarily for money, but for other people.

I'd love if we could try and figure out a social, institutional, structural technology which doesn't require taxes (and thus politics and government) for this. Government slowly but surely gets captured by people with the biggest pockets, until populists take over and everything falls apart with simple wrong answers, or worse, kleptocracy.

>The most meaning in life comes from doing things for other people

Exactly. So we should set up a system that provides everyone with enough to meet their basic needs.

That way they can spend their time and effort to find the way they can most effectively do things for other people rather than finding the local maxima "job I can tolerate that keeps me alive"

The most effective means we have today for determining what we should do for other people is prices.

That means capitalism.

The downsides are lack of agency in large efficient orgs and unearned profits from capital.

I don't know the answer, but I don't think UBI + charity++ is it.

I don't personally buy this. If prices were the most efficient way of determining what we should do for other people, why does the government already subsidize certain medications? Or agriculture? Or public development/education? College education becoming increasingly expensive proves this false, I believe.

The core problem is that at the end of the day no one has to play nice. So we have to have government to set rules about ownership (among other things). But then some entity has to be in charge of government, which means they are actually in charge of allocating ownership. At current our only options consist of some structure made of humans, and even the best among these are corruptible. As such people who have power to corrupt this process (which is to say own the resources necessary to corrupt the process) can do so in an attempt to increase their own ownership. One example is political advertising to push an agenda that is likely to be more profitable. Be this a brick maker getting an agreement to have the new town hall made using bricks, or be this colleges having their customers being given access to large amounts of financing so they can raise their prices.

>College education becoming increasingly expensive proves this false, I believe.

Or is college education becoming more expensive because government has allowed for loans that can't be discharged to be given to people who have been given a false sense of the value college provides. This in turn means there is more demand (including the ability to actually purchase the desired product) for a product that isn't always worth it, increasing price?

One last consideration. Being the most efficient doesn't mean it is as efficient as one could theorize, only that it is more efficient than any alternative that can be put into practice.

> The most effective means we have today for determining what we should do for other people is prices.

That means markets, not capitalism.

Unearned income is unfulfilling in the context of a default assumption that the ability to earn an income is a valid measure of worth. There are other, better, measures.

Making something that other people are willing to reward with the fruits of their own labour is about as honest a social measure of worth as you can get outside of friends and family.

It's also not something that would be taken away by diverting excess productivity to covering people's basic needs. I can at least imagine a world where doing so spurs a renaissance of creativity and entrepreneurship, because, just like you said, people seem to have an innate need to try and do something productive with their time.

If there's a real social fear that I hold, it's that we'd suddenly have supply problems in certain segments of the labor market. I know I, for one, would never have taken that 2nd shift job working in the kitchen of an all night diner if I hadn't needed the money to buy food. I'd have spent that time working on some of the ideas I had for software projects instead.

"I'd have spent that time working on some of the ideas I had for software projects instead." Then this takes off, makes you money, and you are higher class than those who keep their skills "for fun"

EDIT: Not sure if this was understood, this was meant on a commentary on how capitalism and class can find its why back into such a system

Given the idea I had at the time, probably not. But I'd like to think it would have enriched the lives of myself and others, all the same.

In broad strokes, I'm more capitalist than communist, so I don't really disagree with the whole "greed is good" thing. Where I part ways is the unstated - often, I suspect, un-recognized - premise that it's the only good. Money's only useful for what it can buy, and its value has been artificially inflated by a social structure that makes it something that you just can't live without.

> Money's only useful for what it can buy, and its value has been artificially inflated by a social structure that makes it something that you just can't live without.

That's a good point. And makes me think of videogames analogy, particularly MMORPG.

In a typical MMO, you need to labor to earn money (known as "grinding") to buy all the stuff you'll need to make progress easier (and/or possible). But at any time, you can just stop, take time off, go explore the places you've been to (i.e. not containing enemies stronger than you can beat), or even just log out and leave your character be for a week. You lose nothing except time and perhaps your rank in some completely optional competition with other players. But your character won't go hungry, won't starve or freeze to death, won't be evicted for not paying taxes.

That illustrates the difference between money being useful, versus being necessary. And even if it's only useful and not necessary, that doesn't mean you won't be motivated to earn it - you will want more money if the things you can buy with it are interesting enough.

That is a very interesting analogy! I'm going to steal that.

Yes, and that metric is distorted out of all utility by the necessity of maximizing the specifically monetary value of labor, as a condition of survival and stability - and even then, those are frighteningly contingent if they're achievable at all.

There are other kinds of value, too.

If something is enjoyable and rewarding, like making art or an invention, I'd want to do it myself. If a job is unenjoyable and unrewarding, I will use the fruits of my labors to get someone else to do it. I will pay a lot of money to whoever cleans my septic tank. Does that make septic tank cleaners socially valuable, or does that make having a clean septic tank valuable? If a machine can clean the septic tank and no one has to do that task anymore, then I can get what I want without either having to toil myself or convincing someone else to toil.

> Unearned income is unfulfilling and the people who think they earned it resent it being taken from them

This seems like an easy explanation striped of nuance that really needs some data backing it. How is it different from resentment from people who earned it by working? Why is it unfulfilling - is it only because of comparison to others, or is it common even for UBI? Is it specific to feelings about income, but balanced out by easier life, or is it a significant decrease in satisfaction overall?

Things become more fulfilling when you see everyone else doing them, such as raising kids.

There are so many things people could be doing which are not compensated by the market and corporations. “Leaning in and earning $1 instead of 70c” is a meme that corporations use to get more humans to trade quality time with parents and kids for them. [1] Why don’t we ask about “Leaning out and spending more time with our families?” [2]

Open source

Science

Philosophy

Family

Personal development

Volunteering in community

You’ve been CONDITIONED to think that large corporations are better ways to allocate your time and organize us all. That’s why many in NYC lamented when Amazon was not given tax breaks to come to our city. It’s almost as if we need Bezos’ company to organize ourselves an our time so we can get paid the money.

Society spends tons on fossil fuels and commuting and for what? To sit in a chair 30 miles away?

1. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xNzXze5Yza8

2. http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=286

> You've been CONDITIONED

I haven't been conditioned, thanks.

Large corporations enable efficiencies of scale which in turn enables modern living. We can't live at our current standards with artisan search engines, hand-crafted phones and home-made cars. But the same scale which enables modern living alienates workers from their labour. In most companies, all but a select few at the top have very little agency. They mostly get told what to do and they often don't even see the customer that benefits from the value they create. And the people with agency at the top get the vast majority of the profits.

The result is a society with a lot of inequality and poverty, and a mass of alienated consumers trying to purchase those things which are missing in their lives: narrative, stories which connect their consumption with humanity. Hand-made this, small batch that, experiences you can share with other people., the personal touches which weave a life into a broader more meaningful tapestry.

And raising children, of course. But that's somewhat bitter-sweet, knowing the world they're going out into, unless you have some assurance they're going to be among those with agency.

I don't mean this as a personal attack, but I'm struck that your objection to having been "conditioned" is immediately followed by a paragraph affirming the content of the supposed "conditioning".

> > You’ve been CONDITIONED to think that large corporations are better ways to allocate your time and organize us all.

Emphasis added.

> Large corporations enable efficiencies of scale which in turn enables modern living. ...

I want to point out in this connection that advertising (commercial propaganda) is ubiquitous in most modern societies, and IMO counts as "conditioning".

It is objectively true (is, not ought) that in the world we currently live in, large orgs enable scale which enables modern living.

It does not follow that I think that's the way things ought to be. That's how I interpret the "better" in EGreg's comment, because this conversation is about how we can live a better lives, not how to maximize efficiency. But we can only talk about oughts in the context of what can be.

What I'd like - as I've mentioned in another comment here - is some kind of organizational technology which enables the same efficiencies as large orgs, but without the alienation of labour.

Ah, I get it.

I was interested (from a distance) in "Holacracy" but it's hard to find information about how well it works in practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holacracy

Also, FWIW, I'm hoping that automation frees up enough time to be able to support "consensus driven" governance, which is I suspect is theoretically optimal, but it's really expensive:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making

What are you organizing around Mr. Chief Architect? Your company does data visualization for financial firms. Financial firms that don't have a loss condition. How many extrapolations from reality is your business? At least 2, maybe 3, more? As long as the markets your pretty pictures represent can't take a loss - you're only justifying your undeserved opulence. Every bail out absolves people like you from their failure, and denies people like me a better opportunity to out perform you.

Have the labor classes of the U.S. seen any advancement in the last few decades? Are the advances the labor classes of other (US/India) even worthwhile given the lack of political bargaining power?

You economically depress local workers, and sell them on their freedoms and in then in the next breath you're politically oppressing foreign labor classes while selling them on their economic advances. Both are true, but you take the larger margin from both.

Corporations aren’t the best way to organize things. They are good, but have been outcompeted by decentralized systems with small owner-contributors and no ownership of the platform.

LiveJournal vs Wordpress

AOL vs The Web

Britannica vs Wikipedia

I could go on and on. Science, Open Source, Creative Commons allows collaboration instead of a top-down approach, and has been wildly successful.

In the past, we needed centralized manufacturing, centralized telephone operators etc. No longerz

Google “Distributism”

Wordpress -> Facebook -> Instagram etc.; what goes around comes around.

AOL -> Web -> Google AMP etc.

Wikipedia has its editors and its petty squabbles, and worse, its ever increasing budgets (for what, exactly?) funded by guilt-based extortion from the masses, a bunch of parasites feeding on public contributions.

Once a hill has appeared from the bottom up, climbers crawl out of their holes, clamber up and try and steer from the top. And they usually succeed.

On the contrary, when you have only a few large companies, they form oligopolies, there is no competition, free market does not function and the consumer looses out.

Tangential note - I've always found the idiom "job creation" weird and illogical. It seems to be US specific AFAIK. You don't create anything when you decide to exchange money for labor.

Makes sense to me. While there's practically an infinite amount of things that society would like to be done, it's not so easy to turn them into jobs. The exchange of money for labor is constrained from both sides - on the employee side, the job has to provide enough money for the worker to be able to live off it. On the employer side, most jobs only exist if the output of those jobs can be used to make even more money than it took to pay for it. This applies recursively.

In the end, the number of actual jobs available is very limited, and it's not so illogical to call the act of making such money/labor exchange possible as "job creation".

> I've always found the idiom "job creation" weird and illogical.

Probably because the origin of the term is very political in nature.

Currency for things that are currently intangible.

>I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.

Hm there was a certain German economist which had that sort of idea.

> I want an economy where we can celebrate automation and distribute the profits evenly.

Distribution of profits evenly: This is called "company stocks".

"Let them eat cake"

Equal distribution is called taxes and social programs.

Well we could allocate the stocks equally to everyone if we wanted to work with that idea. I'm not sure what to do with the stock market in that scenario though. Maybe we can reallocate annually?

And how many restaurants now have online ordering who would never have had online ordering without being forced to?

However, even before Covid, McDonald's was rolling out touchscreen kiosk and app ordering. So, there has definitely been automation in that sector.

The paper is ... kinda odd ... because its methodology considers machine operators (injection molding machine operators, lathe and machining center operators, etc.) to be some of the most automatable. That's a pretty laughable idea to anyone who has tried to run one of those machines.

Yeah, 20 hours of training got me to the point I can run a CNC mill. However, I wouldn't say I'm good at it. I touch off incorrectly probably 1 in 20 times--which likely blows a part and breaks an end mill. I sometimes don't leave enough clearance to the vice jaws--which certainly breaks a mill and possible damages the machine itself.

I think it was NYC CNC on YouTube that had a whole video of the various fails he's had with CNC milling machines over time. Anyone who has used a CNC cringes at that video because we have all done exactly the same things.

> That's a pretty laughable idea to anyone who has tried to run one of those machines.

That’s not laughable in the slightest to anyone who knows history of machining. There are fewer and fewer machine shops, and at the same time the machining centers are becoming more and more sophisticated. Sure, operating CNC mills requires significant expertise, but so did manual machining. We used to have hundreds of thousands of machinists in this country, making various parts for cars, household appliances etc. Now it’s all factory made. Just because some existing process requires expertise, doesn’t mean that we cannot come up with a new process that will not need that skilled operator as a step.

> Just because some existing process requires expertise, doesn’t mean that we cannot come up with a new process that will not need that skilled operator as a step.

However, completely wiping out a process (replacing sheet metal fabrication with plastics) is not particularly "automation" of said process. You've just changed where the expertise is rather than automated it away.

Replacing injection molding machine operators with 3D printing machine operators is automation because it makes some people go away/requires less expertise.

This kind of thing happens all the time; a crisis in economic terms forcing companies to aggressively pursue cost savings measures that never go away once the economic constraints are lifted. A similar process happened with oil rigs, where automation was available, but only pursued once the price of oil crashed. Those jobs also never came back.

During the last crash, in 2008, my employer at the time, Aspera (since bought out by IBM), boomed as customers moved to cut costs.

The customers replaced shipping disk drives (or, in DoD's case, boxes of analog videotapes!) with transferring files over fiber and satellite links. NYT switched from reading stories aloud over bad phone connections to transferring files via satphone.

This displaced fedex package handlers and mailroom personnel, and stenographers.

In DoD's case, a physical library of surveillance drone videotapes, and everybody schlepping tape cartridges, was replaced with a remote-accessible video library. Nowadays digital video is streamed to Nevada and Utah in real time, and copied off there.

Similar stories apply for numerous other customer industries. These were all permanent changes. Aspera grew to a hundred-some employees in 2014, but must have displaced thousands.

Does this count as automation?

Certainly yes in my opinion.

My current employer had a curiously very successful corona-quarter and building a solid backorder because we cannot have everyone in production right now.

We automate everything we can and still employ more and more people. We often think manufacturing when speaking about automation, but I think administration will be affected most (you won't automate anything if you fired your internal IT department).

We also build a fairly sci-fi robot to populate circuit boards for parts that cannot be fitted by reflow soldering. Great device to show off but the soldering women are just plainly faster and less error prone. And we have quite a high wage level.

But sales planning, accounting, reporting will be mostly automated at some point. Our own in-house production is steadily growing even with additional support by machines.

Of course it is bad if people out of job have no alternative. I think there should be state support for such cases instead of artificially keeping an industry alive.

Administration has always been hit very hard. People don’t remember, but in the 1950s offices regularly had dozens of people who’s only job was calculating things and drafting charts and reports. In some domains they were literally called “computers”, since “compute” has a meaning prior to the electronic computers we now know.

All of these jobs were replaced by a spreadsheet decades ago.

If it’s replacing manual labor with something automated, then it’s almost certainly automation.

> Due to the Covid-19 lock down, my company was forced to accelerate our automation program

This sounds like the centre of the distribution catching up to the frontier moreso than the frontier advancing.

To be fair, "the centre of the distribution catching up" is exactly the fear that the article is criticising. The fear isn't that one company is going to make some huge leap in AI - it's more about what happens if that leap gets adopted en-masse by the whole economy.

I think the OP's comment is very relevant.

Sort of. We do have unique problems to solve given the nature of our products. But to some degree, you are correct. We would have eventually done it to scale, but right now we did it to survive.

A similar thing happened post 2001-bubble-pop and post 2008.

Post 2001, there was a huge shift to offshore models, ticketing-workflow models, and a shift to a blossoming open source environment.

Post 2008, there was another huge shift to more flexible infrastructure models, and to automation.

Companies are often reluctant to restructure workforces, even when there are potential efficiencies available. Economic crises provide an "opportunity" for them to right-size.