If we increased the minimum wage 10x and somehow that policy was binding, there would be a whole lot of involuntary unemployment, workers' overall income would plummet and we would have a deep economic depression. But there's nothing that suggests such effects from an economically viable UBI. Such an UBI would barely be enough for subsistence, possibly not even that, so people would still choose to work if only to acquire some disposable income. For every single thing that 'ceased to be done' because of increased expenses, there would be growing employment in some other, higher-productivity sector.

(In fact, I would argue that high-paying manufacturing jobs have always required some degree of skill, even when this kind of manufacturing work was especially common in the West.)

The ones I've met are intelligent, though their locus of intelligence is in their thumbs. Someone on a project needs to have it there, so that's just fine by me!

Last time I did a robot project, the people who would ultimately be the machine operators were involved every step of the way, learning and building together with the team.

I'm not sure how installing a handful of machines in one small corner of a huge factory that's already full of machines would somehow change someone's entire life. Hopefully it does make it a little easier though!

I have never worked in robotics, save for hobby drones and hexapods. The question is not whether we would enjoy it, it’s whether someone else will. You seem very convinced that you should decide what people do for work. That’s the part I’m trying to get across to you, you should not have that power for anybody but yourself.

I don't think that I've ever decided what people do for work. I unsure if that that is a thing. As far as I (can/do) know, they decide internally and then hire me to help.

I'm not sure how to proceed. Could you unpack your assumptions for me?

If you increase the minimum wage by 10x, well... quite some low wage work wouldn't actually cost 10x a single person's wage to automate. Depending on the nature of the good or service, the price might go up a bit at first to recover development costs, and later it might go down drastically once those costs are recovered.

This is highly speculative, and almost certainly false. The requisite developments in chemistry and metallurgy were nowhere close to realized during classical antiquity.

> quite some low wage work wouldn't actually cost 10x a single person's wage to automate

What about the rest of it?

For example, the Netherlands started out industrializing on wind power using wood and rope and cloth, ...actually they still use a lot of wind power today, though now with exotic composites. (At some point in between there were traditional windmills that were still being updated with odd things like aviation leading edge slats made of aluminium up to something like the 1950s! )

So -while speculative and certainly open to discussion- in some alternate history Romans could have had some sort of industrial system, though it might not look like something we would immediately recognize.

I'm trying to convey the intuition that if you have a perfectly workable society based on slavery (the cheapest form of labor), you don't have as strong an incentive to start using machines instead. Conversely, I have the impression that the abolition of slavery in the 19th century is one of the big contributors to our modern industrial society.

I'm just being cautious wrt saying that most low wage work wouldn't cost 10x to automate. One can never be sure one hasn't missed an example somewhere.

Of course, if we find some examples of low wage work that really do cost more than 10X the cost of the work needed to automate it, possibly we've been under-valuing those tasks all along.

Emerging global trade networks incentivized producers to scale up indefinitely. The resulting innovations transformed the textile industry. Textiles are always in demand, and their non-mechanized production is extremely labour intensive. The lessons learned from mechanizing this industry were applied everywhere else. It's true that competition with cheap Indian labour was a major factor in textile automation in the UK, but these global trade networks could not have been sustained without massive advancements in stellar navigation provided by the invention of the telescope. This in turn was only made possible by advancements in chemistry that enabled the production of clear glass.

All of these processes were well underway before the abolition of slavery in the US. It should be noted that innovations such as the cotton gin were eagerly adopted by the slave-powered US cotton industry. There's nothing like efficiency for an industrialist.

With regards to automation, I think all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked. We're left with things that seem simple, but are in fact horribly difficult, and require near-human levels of dexterity and situational awareness, such as driving or construction work or food handling. That however doesn't mean that our society would be just fine if we provided workers in these industries an alternative to their jobs.

WRT windmills, don't take my word for it.