It's so fascinating that physical labor seems to be the main concern when it comes to robots doing it better/cheaper than humans. If anything, we know that automation is coming after office desk jobs first. Those jobs are much easier to automate. Language models can read a manuscript and spit out a summary/judgment with much better my friend that has read so many books and evaluate book projects. The "robot" has read more books, can memorize more of the manuscript as it reads it and does it much much much faster.
Maybe publishing houses are not comfortable replacing her with an AI but it will eventually happen.
We've been automating away office jobs for a lot longer than we've been putting ML in robots to automate factory work, though.
For example, the way business mail used to work was that the bureaucrat in question would record their message onto a tape, and then send that tape off to a special department full of typists to actually turn that voice recording into a letter. That whole concept is not only gone, but it's such a foreign idea that it sounds like something you'd write for a dieselpunk novel. The moment we started putting computers on people's desks, we expected everyone to know how to type. Same thing goes for a lot of other office tasks, which are now comfortably managed by software suites we literally call "Office".
That being said, the new wave of machine-learning powered automation scares me. Not because I'm worried that my job will be taken by software, but because said software will barely work. For factory jobs, the risks are obvious; that's why we put these robots in cages[0]. However, these office jobs are still making critical decisions that will increasingly be handled by automation. We already know how much having to deal with Google sucks; and they are pretty much addicted to automating away all their support staff. In your manuscript example, it could be that the ML model just starts burying specific genres of book or books with specific types of characters in them, for stupid reasons.
[0] Or if you're Amazon, you put the workers in cages, because Dread Pirate Bezos hates them.
> Not because I'm worried that my job will be taken by software, but because said software will barely work.
If said automation works like most corporate initiatives I've been a part of, it'll require 5 employees to implement, update, and maintain for every 1 that it saves, meanwhile costing millions of dollars per year to some vendor for a support license. Some workers might be let go but they were on the chopping block anyway. A few years later the whole thing is scrapped and the cycle starts over again.
One of the most interesting automations I saw was a system intended to let the company handle more calls with fewer people by pushing people into not talking to a human.
Except the reason they had so many calls in the first place was largely because every other business process was fucked, which kinda meant you needed a human.
I call this automating feeding coal into a dumpster fire.
"Broken process vs broken execution?" is one of the first questions everyone should keep in mind during automation discovery. But it's (usually) a nuanced call.
This is why automation to cut costs in a lax labor market is much less interesting than automation in a tight and tightening labor market.
The fear of wages and workers, not just idle "gee more profits would be nice", is what makes automation actually go, vs floundering out as some middle managers doing a b2b steak dinner grift
<<Not because I'm worried that my job will be taken by software, but because said software will barely work. For factory jobs, the risks are obvious; that's why we put these robots in cages[0]. However, these office jobs are still making critical decisions that will increasingly be handled by automation.
Just to build on this a little. Even if they do work, general population will have little to no understanding on how they work. They will be little black boxes that govern our daily lives with little to no way to correct it if things go awry. As much as I am amazed by what ML can do already, we need some basic customer facing documentation on how it is supposed to work.
Not just general population, but actual employees!
We've already seen this with legacy code. Whereas a manual process featured someone you could have a conversation with, how many 10+ year old apps are there that have some quirk that nobody remembers or understands?
Automation is going to make that worse, because it goes from "that process 3 people know about" to "that process no one has thought about in 5 years."
This is one of the dystopian incoming realities. Automation will be extremely pervasive in daily life and especially in urban environments. But because it will be dumb and there will be no profit in making it smarter or to improve respectful interaction with humans, we will be the ones corralled to allow the automation have free reign. Whatever noble intentions the small minority working on this might have, it will mainly be another gut punch to human dignity in the name of capitalism.
I know this is a bit of a low effort argument, but every ML "enhanced" product I use ay my job is a variation on "you entered data xyz - here are some more examples where people entered .xyz. and this is the result they got:..." or "you are entering data at time ab:cd - here is what other people searched for at similar times:...".
“For example, the way business mail used to work was that the bureaucrat in question would record their message onto a tape, and then send that tape off to a special department full of typists to actually turn that voice recording into a letter. That whole concept is not only gone, but it's such a foreign idea that it sounds like something you'd write for a dieselpunk novel. The moment we started putting computers on people's desks, we expected everyone to know how to type.”
It’s true that executives now do their own typing, but that is not automation. It’s actually a rare case of modern work becoming less specialized, with a whole category of highly specialized workers (typists) ceasing to exist.
If the executive uses voice-to-text technology, then that would be a case of automation.
If you try using a vintage typewriter you will reconsider. It was a ton more work than now.
(1) Typewriter keyboards were actually physically strenuous... find an old manual typewriter and type a couple pages on it and see how whether you feel like typing a dozen more. This was rectified beginning in the 60s I think, but manual models were still around for a while due to cost.
(2) Even once electric typewriters were invented, dealing with minor typos, let alone more major textual surgery, remained a huge hassle until the personal computer / full word processor came about allowing on screen editing... Just imagine typing most of a page only to realize you forgot a sentence near the middle, or even made just a small typo. which is around when typists stopped being a thing, because then, and only then, typing had become so automated that a reasonably skilled bureaucrat wasn't really saving much time (and losing latency) by using the typing pool, especially for brief, urgent memoranda.
It is a case of automation working so well, you don't even notice it at all and thus think nothing was automated, until you think about it in more detail.
The automation with a word processor is not the input (the typing), it's the page layout and reflow, and being able to edit and get WYSIWYG before committing to the printed page.
My best typing experience, typewriters manual or electric, or computer keyboards, was the IBM Selectric. Second best was on an AT&T 3270 (!?!) with a mechanical clicking keyboard, similar to original IBM PC, but even better. I mean using a 3270 isn't great fun but the typing was great.
To extend your excellent summary of office automation, you can think of most government functions as a manually operated AI. There are piles of rules and regulations to administer, and that is ripe for automation. However, can you imagine the horror of, say, a machine efficient IRS? The only thing that makes a lot of the regulatory regime survivable is the inefficiency of the bureaucracy. A hyper efficient bureaucracy would be suffocating.
I think you're right about automation coming for office jobs, but it's not that odd that physical labor would be the focus, a couple hundred years ago, like 95% of people worked in agriculture, and automation is the reason only 1% of people do today. It's harder to suss out how many factory jobs have been automated away compared to how many are just being done elsewhere, but a lot of factory labor has been automated as well.
It's almost like automation is coming for office jobs because it already claimed the low-hanging fruit elsewhere.
Human computers were automated by computers and created the programming jobs. But we have many more of those than ever and it seems to increase even more.
There are types of jobs that don’t necessarily get reduced even though productivity is increased.
For example the number of military soldiers is mostly a political decision. Managers, lawyers and other bureaucrats are increasing in numbers and power despite having better educated workers and more sophisticated tools.
The economic and political games we play are not aligning with reducing work time to pre industrial levels. Technological progress cannot be thought of as independent of societal factors.
Agree with your broad point, but minor nitpick about soldiers: we've substantially cut armed forces personnel, because they're hellaciously expensive with benefits.
While there are no human computers who actually add and multiply, there is a lot of programmers. But this is not because they replaced human computers 1:1, it's because electronic computers have replaced huge swaths of everything around us. I go to my kitchen, of all places, and I see my microwave oven, my coffee machine, my bread-making machine, even likely my gas stove all run by small embedded computers. To say nothing of the advanced computer attached to a bunch of radio interfaces most everyone carries around these days.
I think your last assumption is correct. Agriculture, textiles, automobiles, and food production (not restaurants) have all seen significant automation, while office jobs have actually increased.
Very good point, the physical labour we still see has survived 100+ years of attempted automation so is very resilient to it (relatively speaking). Whereas there is still a lot of office works that you can look at and quite easily think "there must be a way for a machine to handle that".
Even before you need language models, though, there's an insane amount of "digital manual labor" that involved people shuttling files around and validating / cross referencing data in ways that would be done far more correctly and efficiently by software. In my opinion, low code tooling threatens many more jobs than AI does in the short term.
This seems like one of those problems where the last 5% is going to take 99% of the effort and time.
A lot of people would be out of jobs if data was truly interchangeable, and there were robust ways of formatting data that would work for everything people wanted to do, and software was bug-free and exported/imported perfectly every time, but... even something "standard" like date/time data is all sorts of hard to have people and their systems actually do correctly in a general way.
There's definitely a lot of spaces where this is true but a huge fraction of spaces are not even that complicated.
I volunteer my time for various pandemic assistance and basic income work and the number of finance companies (banks, payment processors, etc) that rely on a human being regularly downloading a CSV from one system and uploading it unchanged to another is _absolutely_asinine_.
That does sound near-trivial to automate, but then I've got to wonder how frequently "regular" is? Saving someone 15 minutes a day is gonna be hard to justify spending programmer time on - or paying for a 3rd party solution? Are there people moving those spreadsheets for like 20+hrs a week?
When I temped at Bank of America, there were 20s of people who effectively just shuttled CSVs between points A and B, and a whole on premise army of programmers who made our work redundant. So...
I have a feeling a lot of people commenting never worked outside IT. I worked in marketing twice and in sales once just to see if I would like other career than programming. The amount of stuff I automated was amazing.
The problem is, it's hard to automate stuff for people in a scalable way. There is recent YC startup Axios, but when I tried to automate something with their software, the learning curve was too big.
I think the best way to automate the office work would be "automation houses" where people sell software that automates stuff. I think we have this for big companies, but smaller ones are left doing boring jobs
There would be no need for 75% of automation if all products had (1) a programmatic interface that covered 100% of functionality & (2) a data standard.
Unfortunately, that's something that almost no customer is mature enough to ask for, so down it goes on the priority list, if it makes it at all.
At least web apps are slightly better, as some sort of data packet is actually transmitted (even if user-action initiated), so easier to draw an interface line.
This is how competition is snuffed out - the companies that realize this have already completed the switch or have started it and they'll be the ones to outlast all their competitors that have fallen behind with slower processes.
This has been true for as long as people have written software. We eliminate ops with clouds, assembly with compilers, code with libraries, software with SaaS and platforms.
What makes low-code/no-code different from everything else?
I consider it yet another tool in the abstraction stack that allows folks without software backgrounds to use their expertise to fill their operational needs.
Disclaimer: my intention with low/no-code tooling is likely broader and includes everything from WYSWIG form builders to Airtable automations, etc. The key to me is the usage of (1) syntax-free (2) domain-specific tooling to (3) configure software to meet (4) custom business needs (what a mouthful).
I don't buy it. Low code can make ICs much more productive, but you don't fire the other three... They have a ton of institutional and domain knowledge. You just find things for them to do that wouldn't have been worthwhile without the leverage that came from low code.
While i'm not in favor of firing folks (especially if they do have institutional, domain knowledge)...i firmly believe that orgs will endeavor to force or influence or sneakily trick folks who have domain knowledge into codifying such knowledge which gets input into digital processes which will - also think - get codified by low code tools. As a technologist i like the automation part, but as sympathetic human, i hate that humans will be impacted. By impacted of course i mean that crappy orgs won;t try to find more relevant roles for these impacted humans, they'll resort to crappy things likke layoffs. (Separately, i do believe very much in universal basic income...and in fact having something like UBI in place keeps both my tech brain and human brain happy in a sort of win-win scenario where we get more aujtomation, but humans are taken care of.)
What you'll find in a lot of workplaces you can't automate judgement of something like a book, because of the management's ever shifting definition of what they want.
Twilight is a big hit, and suddenly they want a bunch of teen paranormal romance, and it's even fine if it's poorly written by normal standards if it has the right themes. Your AI from before is largely useless.
I disagree on the order of things. Both are equally on the chopping block.
Physical labor has reasons to be focused first compared to office jobs because as a society we've scaled that up far more (more jobs that involve physical labor than office jobs/those that don't), all that physical labor and scale comes at a large cost, and physical labor is at times easier to automate compared to office work. You can decompose the steps of delivering food to a table or lifting a box and dropping it down somewhere else. Naturally, we've converged to optimize for simplicity when it comes to physical labor because people in physical labor don't like wasted effort or operations that change all the time, whereas office jobs can have many conditional branches unpruned.
There are a few publishing companies in NYC that pitch manuscript ideas and ghost writers are hired to write it. Currently a profitable company, only works around cookbooks and logical book ideas that AI could pick up (what's trending on google, etc), but either way it's coming.
Majority of Excel jobs I have seen in regulated industries are because people use the tools that they are familiar with for everything. Do you really need a spreadsheet to generate reports? Project Management Tracking? Timesheets? Task Lists? Calendars and Schedules?
The majority of the jobs people do are updating crap in spreadsheets that don’t need to be there. If it weren’t for SOPs and audits, this stuff could be wiped out easily.
The only protection for these office workers is the status quo and inertia to change. Excel provides some task automation but still requires recurring human input and maintenance. The new wave of AI does NOT.
Sure in 2022...but when spreadsheet software first arose....many people lost their jobs and many many more people were hired in jobs that never existed before.
I dunno, the job of customer service phone rep seems like it should be easy to automate, and they've been attempting to do so for decades, but how many people get absolutely frustrated with such systems?
I interned in sales. One of my jobs was logging into CRM, counting how many people have tasks to do today / tomorrow / overdue.
Count how many deals moved since last day. Count deals value in the basket for specific stages.
It would take me 15 minutes a day, before I spent 15 minutes automating it. I know this is extreme example, but one that happened in my job. That was a startup with some of the best VCs in Europe.
Another international unicorn, had me create a marketing campaign and then copy the data from the marketing software into an excel. Just copy it like date, name of campaign, number of target users.
I guess I spent like 30 minutes a day doing this. Just copying stuff from one web app to a spreadsheet.
Automating customer service is hard, but work is so manual people in the programming field I think have no idea. Also made me unable to work in marketing or sales as I would just want to spend time automating stuff.
Summary maybe, but a judgement I doubt. Your robot would have to be able to address how the book fits into the current zeitgeist which is not something written down. It's ephemeral and intrinsic to the climate of current affairs, pop culture and most challenging, how people actually feel about the combination of all those facts.
Humans can fail to grasp all that too, but I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of culture and it's tendency to change rapidly.
Agree. Robotics get the bad rap because it can physically be pointed at vs. an AI in the cloud. Robots mostly take redundant physical labor whereas software is taking the cush jobs away.
This story has stuck with me since I read it many years back. And then seeing it come to life in so many ways where machines are "optimizing" processes and workflows for humans is scary.
I’ve been watching a lot of factory tour videos (most are in China) on YouTube. Especially the electronics kind. I notice that the ones pre-2015 are full of humans and now it’s a lot more machines.
On one hand, automation will help bring back manufacturing competitiveness in the West because the capital expenditure is going down (a dobot mg400 which is ~$4k) and labour is essentially $0. On the other hand, what will happen to all the low cost labour in the developing nations? Such as the migrant workers in China?
Forget about here in North America where UBI is a possibility - I think we can agree UBI is not possible in low income countries.
One thing about all this is that Trades or service jobs such as salons - I don’t see that being automated anytime soon.
Btw whenever the topic of Amazon workers comes up I think about the movie Nomadland. Check it out if you haven’t watched it yet.
> I think we can agree UBI is not possible in low income countries
No, we won't agree. Any country can tax its industry (GDP) by certain percentage and redistribute this among its population as an UBI. It might not sustain you, but it is a form of universal dividend.
The actual percentage is only a matter of political choice. I don't think any country (unless there is like a disastrous famine, and even most famines today are actually redistribution problems in disguise) can really say that redistributing 100% of its GDP would not be able to sustain its population. So there must exist a lower percentage from which this is possible.
I wish modern Western economies would have the guts to do this with about 20% of their GDP. Economic history shows that (especially progressive) taxation actually matters very little when it comes to economic growth.
> I wish modern Western economies would have the guts to do this with about 20% of their GDP. Economic history shows that (especially progressive) taxation actually matters very little when it comes to economic growth.
UBI is much more than just taxation - a UBI at 20% of GDP would almost certainly cause massive inflation. That's ~$10000 per person per year in the US.
And that's not to mention that a 20% UBI would have to be on top of already existing government spending to maintain infrastructure and services. If it replaced social benefits in the US, it'd add an extra trillion or two to the federal budget (already 25% of GDP!) depending on which services you allowed it to replace.
The simple answer to all these questions of "what will happen to people currently working in industry X or job Y" is – they will retire, and won't be replaced. Those studying or entering the workforce will see the reduced opportunities and pursue other career paths.
Automation isn't going to happen overnight. It is a generational change.
> I think we can agree UBI is not possible in low income countries.
This got me wondering, what is the best analysis of whether UBI is feasible economically for a given country? How low is too low? Does it boil down to something like the difference between average per capita income and average per capita GDP? Or something else; is it possible to afford UBI even if GDP is lower than personal income?
I didn’t know what the middle income trap was. I just looked it up and Brazil is one of the 2 examples used on Wikipedia. It appears from a little bit more Googling that Brazil’s GDP is much higher than it’s average income, suggesting that it could afford a UBI, no? (Edit: South Africa is the other one, and it too appears to have higher GDP than income in comparable adjusted PPP dollars.)
I might contend that all countries might be able to afford universal healthcare, that universal healthcare is actually less expensive than private for-profit medicine regardless of the size of the economy. While people do contend that publicly funded healthcare might be more expensive, it seems like the main argument these days is that the quality of public healthcare is lower than free-market healthcare. Unfortunately, the US is one of the biggest and best examples of being both more expensive and worse quality than a decent sized list of countries with public healthcare.
Yea I would like to learn more about a 2nd or 3rd world take on UBI because it doesn’t even seem in reach in first world countries. Same goes for the 4 day workweek!
There’s a lot of countries that provide free healthcare, like Cuba. So UBI should be possible in places like Cuba?
At the same time, the robots haven’t taken people’s jobs in Cuba yet.
Another question. Shouldn’t some sort of Universal Healthcare come before UBI?
> Shouldn’t some sort of Universal Healthcare come before UBI?
Good question, I don’t know, but maybe yes, especially if it takes longer to implement UBI than healthcare. OTOH, if a UBI was enough money to cover both healthcare and living expenses, and if it was achievable and could be implemented just as quickly, then there’s nothing wrong with that. Realistically UBI is probably much more difficult politically, and more expensive, so you’re probably right.
Basic income works from parents to children, for example trust funds. Sometimes it’s expanded to families, for example emirates in UAE. The next level is small countries with large sovereign wealth funds. Of course family seems to lose its meaning once you have 7 billion family members.
re: dobot, that's an impressive robot arm, and it's even cheaper than what you cited! ($2700 on the product page)
My first thought is why don't we see more food automation? ex. retrofitting these in a mcdonalds kitchen should be in the realm of possibility. Food is my largest expense behind rent and taxes, I imagine the same is true for most.
The fidelity and affordability of these machines has definitely taken a huge leap forward in the past few years. Many will echo "the technology isn't there yet", but it certainly feels like we're on the cusp of full robo revolution. Excited to see how far this will go by 2030.
I thought this was an interesting insight into what a fully-automated grocery store looks like. And also wild to think about how different things are when you design them for automation from the ground up.
I wonder how much of a McDonald’s costs are staff. If most of the cost of a cheeseburger is food costs plus stuff like real estate then it might not make sense to replace the people with robots, especially once you account for needing a few humans to manage the place and maintenance (plus accounting for downtime when stuff breaks).
Yea lots of desktop class industrial arms available in next few years! The mg400 seems like the best value with industrial (rather than educational) in mind.
I’ve been looking at the Epson Scara arms but those go for like 10k I can’t afford it lol.
Yea I see a lot of small startup types but no big chains like macdonalds, even with a POC to fully automate! Surprised Uber Eats isn’t in on it with their ghost kitchens and autonomous car endeavours.
The main ones that seem to be lowest hanging fruit are coffee, pizza, and stir fry.
Also, sushi/maki machines have been widely used for a long time!
I think its 5-10 years before complete automation. We are seeing more partial automation, such as a deep fryer that will automatically lower/raise the fryer basket, and being able to order without needing waitstaff to take the order.
The main part holding it back now is not the capital cost of the equipment, its the NRE (non-recurring engineering) costs in making all of the equipment operate together as there is not a standard platform to make various pieces of equipment easy to plug together.
What a boon for small businesses. Standing at a punch press is not only tedious but can be dangerous work. That person who did that could spend their time inspecting the stamped parts, loading the material and supervising the robot instead of wearing themselves out doing a repetitive task. Automation doesn't have to replace the complete manufacturing process, just the easy parts.
>> That person who did that could spend their time inspecting the stamped parts, loading the material and supervising the robot instead of wearing themselves out doing a repetitive task. Automation doesn't have to replace the complete manufacturing process, just the easy parts.
Automation always reduces labor costs. If the company wants to spend the savings on a human doing something else that's an option, but the notion that automation creates more jobs is false.
> the notion that automation creates more jobs is false
This is true in the first-order analysis but history has shown that people with free time will find a way to use their newfound time to create new industry. It wasn't all that long ago that >50% of people were farmers. We don't have 50% unemployment now that we have mega-combines and all the other machinery that has made it so <1% of people need to farm. We won't have 50% unemployment when the robots come to do factory jobs and drive trucks.
That is just people filling unmet existing demand and has nothing to do with the automation. They would have done that anyway if it paid as well or better.
Automation kills jobs. We know this because the businesses paying for it understand TCO. And even though higher paying jobs are "created" in the form of robot builders and maintainers, there are fewer of those needed than are replaced. So even if the TCO was the same, there would be strictly fewer man-hours worked with automation.
I am an accountant. Automation is for sure coming for a lot of my jobs. What I have seen is that automation guts out the middling jobs. So, you still need data entry clerks, and you still need "strategy" type roles. But the middle ground are the ones that go, or rather, you don't recruit for those roles. The machines get them.
It is honestly the same in tech. The idea/product guy is still there and so are the people piecing it together. But the people in the middle: task masters, documentation writers, manual testers, etc are always being automated away.
The middle jobs are under attack.
Future jobs will just be feeding the AI til it no longer needs us.
Some people point many factors as a "need" for basic income. Automation is one of them. Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit only its owners.
I donno, we already have automation doing a lot of things today. Lack of work is only due to lack of imagination and tools like this make us more capable than ever.
The universe is infinitely complex and large, there is plenty for people to do.
How so? It seems one needs capital to start new things, time to use their imagination (as opposed to seeking necessities), and then customers able to pay for whatever the new thing is. I think there are tons of constraints in feasibility.
I think he's saying something approximately like: there are likely jobs we can't think of yet that will pop up. They always have.
Imagine if you went back in time 200 years and explained how current farming and current manufacturing work, and explain that's how it will work in 200 years time. A reasonable person would likely assume hardly anyone was working in this future state, that there would be no jobs.
To a certain extent that is true. But it matters where those jobs are eliminated. Usually the jobs that replace lower jobs or offset the automation are higher level. Do we actually believe that everyone in society is able to work the higher level jobs? I would think the jobs would need to align to the population's potential.
To a certain extent, high level jobs of today are low level jobs of tomorrow. Imagine what one can do today with just a mobile phone, compared to what could be done 50 years ago.
Nobody could translate in all the languages 50 years ago; today, anyone do it, without any particular cognitive requirement.
> That's actually eliminated/reduced the needs for translators
This is a radically misinformed statement. These are the real-world experience I've had with translators:
- translator with degree in languages, occasional translator: never mentioned Google Translate
- semi-professional translator (significant source of income coming from it): said that most professionals nowadays use GT as first pass; never mentioned GT being a threat
- multiple gigs I've requested for official documentation: those can't be done via GT, as they require a certified translator
- realtime translation I needed: again, can't be done via GT, as a certified translator is required
The idea that GT is eliminating translators is nonsense. It actually augments their capacity (re-read above, this is a real-world opinion of a translator).
> The jobs replacing it are much fewer and higher skilled (software dev).
Even assuming the (wrong) argument that GT eliminates jobs, SW devs are just one of the options. This actually reflects the ancestor comment: "Lack of work is only due to lack of imagination". Computer translation surely helped businesses around the world in communicating on a global scale, in a way that previously was not resource-effective (e.g. lookup on the dictionary); while this can't be quantified, it's the opposite of "reducing jobs".
Automation started around 300 years ago, not 30. If the automation-pessimists were right, essentially no jobs would exist by now. See lump of labour fallacy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour.
Yep, totally agree with what you are saying. It is fundamentally uncertain. I do believe there are more jobs than we realize which aren't capable of being automated - things where there is a lot of diversity in the tasks required to do the job. Consider a real estate broker - no single task is rocket science, but there are perhaps 100 individual things a broker needs to be able to do. It's not going to be automated away. These 'highly diverse task' jobs are very common.
you could totally automate a real estate broker... a drone or android could easily show you a place, and maybe there's another person at a call-center who's showing 15 homes/hour, but that displaces 20 brokers/agents....
Or you could just realize that real estate is a broken industry and why does there even need to be a broker at all... List your home yourself, have software that does the rest...
I mean, lawyers, doctors, software programming, can easily be placed in the next 20 years. All fast-food, grocery, freight(depending on self-driving cars, or perhaps better train systems that have direct to store delivery)..
I look forward to the day when only 5% of the population is employable, because we'll have to figure out someway to live post-scarcity or just let people starve, but if 5% work, 5% then are consumers too...and that leaves out a lot of power, control, and economic potentiality.
Have you gone through the entire process and bought a house? It's complicated. There is a lot more to it than showing houses. If it were anything like as easy as you suggest, it would be done already - it's a giant market with money sloshing around.
I don't buy that doctors, lawyers, software engineers or real estate brokers will be automated away in 20 years. As a society there has been 15 solid years put into automating driving a car - a skill so simple we allow 16 year olds with no formal training and half of who have an iq less than 100 to do it. Doctors, lawyers, software engineers and real estate brokers have jobs which are very complex compared to driving a car.
Most real estate is not complicated. It looks complicated to people who haven't done it. In most states there's a standard form and the process is simple. If things get complicated, then you need a real estate attorney.
Fair enough, maybe that's why it seems simple? You do enough of them it starts seeming easy? To me it seemed like there was a lot of moving parts throughout the process.
I conceptualize a UBI as a dividend, where every citizen has exactly one nontransferable ownership share of the nation state and has the right to share in it's profit.
You can get that today by simply buying into one of the many low cost ETFs available following the S&P500 index. No need to wait for the State to do it for you.
> Yes, it’s not equal and not free either. But we have it working today.
I mean, it's literally not working, even a little bit, for the vast majority of the people who would be net beneficiaries under a UBI. This is “let them eat cake” levels of out-of-touch.
The greatest mass-pulling out of poverty I personally witnessed in my lifetime was when the communist states of Eastern Europe moved to capitalism. More of that, please.
Capitalism is very good at allocating capital and as a result innovating to increase the "ceiling" of the human experience.
Capitalism is very bad at increasing the "floor" of the human experience. Almost by definition, there is some threshold, X% of the population, where the marginal reward is no longer worth the effort (in lay terms - its not "worth it" to R&D and innovate to build amazing and cheap products for poor people). Trickle down economics typically doesn't happen[0]. This band typically is the target and victim of rent seeking - i.e. stagnation with a higher long-term price than innovation. Historically, Capitalism has always just exploited the floor through rent seeking until that "floor" dies a few decades later, then continues to exploit the new "floor".
UBI is a focus on improving that "floor" of the human experience (different than other government programs by reducing stigma and increasing guarantees).
If you can think of it, I would love to hear about a way to incentivize Capitalism to increase the "floor" of the human experience. If you want more capitalism, we need to figure out how do we incentivize more "Altruistic Capitalism" (maybe a different name?). There are some companies kinda starting to do this, I've heard them called "For Purpose Capitalism"/"For Purpose Companies" e.g. Tom's shoes, etc.
The floor of the human experience is not what got us to the moon and invented the transistor.
> Trickle down economics typically doesn't happen
Is that why basically everyone in America has some sort of always-connected smartphone with more computing power than a laptop from 2008 did? Citing telecom infrastructure as your example is just arguing in poor faith as it's well known American telecom infra is an oligopoly/monopoly. Just because there are some market failures doesn't mean we should throw the entire market out the window by implementing UBI.
The point I’m making is about the floor. I agree with your statement that the market is amazing for the average, even the 25th percentile. But there is some percentile after which the market no longer prioritizes the people (except to rent seek). It’s simple market dynamics: At a certain point, the marginal value of acquiring users is no longer worth the marginal cost of acquisition.
For example, not everyone in the USA has smartphones[0]. The biggest discrepancy is by age, which we can possibly factor as a choice. The second biggest discrepancy is by wealth. There is a 2000bps difference in rates between people making more than $75k vs people making less than $35k. There is no profit in a $5/month smartphone plan. So the poorest will consistently be excluded.
This isn’t a market failure. Markets are in their nature utilitarian on a single metric and truly aren’t designed to improve the floor of the human experience.
Take the trolley problem for example. It’s supposed to be a hard problem because of all the nuance. The market “solves” the trolley problem trivially by running over the least wealthy group of people.
Markets aren’t a solution for improving the floor. At best, the market is punting the problem (until that group of least fortunate dies) and at worst the market is rent seeking, exacerbating the problem.
The link you sent shows a heavy bias towards age being the major contributor of people not having smartphones. According to it, 96% of age 18-49 have smartphones. Knowing the income distribution of the US, it's not possible that there's a 2000 bps gap caused purely by income disparity given that 96% number. What's more likely is that for older low income people the smartphone adoption rate is very low, but for younger generations it's very high (even though they're poor). That lines up with what I anecdotally see - even homeless people have smartphones.
> There is no profit in a $5/month smartphone plan
$15/mo plans with multiple gigabytes of LTE + unlimited 3G exist (Mint Mobile). There's an entire class of MVNO dedicated to the low cost market. I myself pay $25/mo for 10GB of LTE through AT&T. And the reason the price isn't lower is because the carriers (who are an oligopoly - that's why they pay massive dividends) lease time on the towers to the MVNOs and determine the price at which the time is leased.
> Markets aren’t a solution for improving the floor.
In the long run, they are. Smartphones coming into existence did more for the vast majority of poor than any amount of government subsidy of telecom bills did. (If you didn't know, the FCC subsidizes low income Americans' wireless bills!) The reason internet prices haven't been a race to the bottom yet like smartphones is precisely _because_ there is an oligopoly and a non-functioning market.
If you compare markets where Google Fiber entered to ones where they didn't, the impact of a competitor actually trying to win market share and compete is obvious.
Can you give me an example of a market with substantial competition that has ignored the 10th percentile of customers?
I have a few ideas. There are 3 problem-areas in the world holding back poor people today: education, health and housing. Look at what worked in other areas to raise the floor and apply it here. There is just one answer: free markets.
Not a coincidence but education, health and housing are heavily regulated everywhere and even governmentally run in some places. De-regulate them, allow the free markets to do their magic to find solutions, reduce prices and thus raise that floor.
Then remove artificial barriers in the jobs market like minimum wages. Allow people to be employed no matter how little their added value is worth. Free companies from onerous regulations and make creating a competing company easy and cheap instead.
Finally, separate the Economic power in state, just like Executive and Legislative powers are separated. Make it illegal for governments to engage in, regulate or influence economic activity. Focus their role on ensuring freedoms and applying externalities to markets through taxation. Also accept and use taxation's role in shaping societal behavior.
Oh, and re-energize private charity by removing the corrupt and ineffectual state welfare crutch.
A better analogy is that you already an ownership share in the nation state with citizenship - you have voting rights, a court system that works for you, you benefit monetarily by having a secure military and police force (thus not needing to directly pay for bodyguards or protection from some sort of mafia).
That's just objectively not true - welfare systems stop people from becoming homeless or starving in the street all the time.
Libertarianism/neoliberalism is the ideological model that doesn't care about the poor - social democracy isn't perfect but it is an improvement over just letting people die.
It’s not about caring, it’s about results. Capitalism is the only system that pulled both countries and people out of poverty, because it’s the best system at motivating people to create value.
Redistributing systems are naturally demotivating. The balance is being tried indeed but it’s a slippery slope in a democracy where people just learn that they can vote more money in their pockets.
It is entirely possible that a system that has worked well in the past finds itself in need of replacement or significant modification due to circumstances it has created. Monarchy was useful for pulling disparate tribes into larger nations via conquest. Government private land granting incentivized rapid expansion of a colonial people across lightly-defended foreign territory, which was then conquered and parceled up.
But when there is no more land to grant, what happens? When there are no more tribes to conquer, what happens?
When there is massive abundance and most of it is owned by 1% of the population... What happens?
> Redistributing systems are naturally demotivating
In a country where 1 in 100 people own a total of 40% of the nation's total wealth, a back-of-the-napkin guess strongly suggests the net motivation of spreading that wealth around would be positive.
No other system we tried was better at reducing global poverty and advancing the society. The reason capitalism works so well is that it works with human nature, not against it: it incentivizes value creators by allowing them to keep a large share of the value they create. The majority of that value though, goes to the society, rising it.
> demotivating... to the people who end up with less
No, demotivating to the people creating value.
> spreading that wealth around would be positive
That is exactly what communists did when taking power: stole the wealth and spread it around. It lasted some good 10-20 years, then they started starving, because why would anyone create any more wealth if it was gonna be confiscated anyway?!
> No other system we tried was better a reducing global poverty and advancing the society.
What systems have we tried, and who and when are you talking about? What are you comparing to? Some of the best examples we have today are the ones that aren’t exactly pure capitalism, like Norway and Finland. If capitalism is so great, why are countries that hold capitalism back and provide more social services raking better than the US on nearly all economic, development, and social measures?
> it incentivizes value creators by allowing them to keep a large share of the value they create.
Do you recognize this spin, or is it unintentional? It’s motivating to lose some of the value you create by working to someone else?? Wouldn’t it be a lot more motivating to keep all the value you create? Wouldn’t it be even more motivating to not work, and get to keep some of the value other people create? Yeah, I think it probably is.
> That is exactly what communists did when taking power: stole the wealth and spread it around. It lasted some good 10-20 years, then they started starving, because why would anyone create any more wealth if it was gonna be confiscated anyway?!
This feels like the McCarthy school of economics. Russia’s problems didn’t stem from lack of proletariat motivation, it came from authoritarian abuses of power. You seem to be forgetting about China entirely.
> That is exactly what communists did when taking power: stole the wealth and spread it around. It lasted some good 10-20 years, then they started starving
There were a lot of overlapping factors that killed the Soviet experiment. A major one, and the real root cause of "people started starving," is that Russia is a massive country that is historically vulnerable to famines because food is relatively hard to grow at those latitudes; people had starved under the czars of the past, and the main reason we think starvation will be minimized in the future is a global revolution in how agriculture is done of which Russia was a part, not anything particularly virtuous in the modern Russian practice of capitalism.
Another major factor was a combination of central planning and failure to grasp modern science which resulted in error being expanded. Stalin famously supported a Michurinism view of trait growth through stress over the Darwininan view of natural selection, which led to some bad conclusions when agriculture was centrally-planned under a bad model. While central planning can aggravate error (and there's a reasonable discussion to be had about how tax dollars are allocated), a capitalist society is extremely vulnerable to similar failure modes; while ideally, damage gets contained via the "firebreak" of a few companies failing when their heterodoxy proves wrong (or succeeding and displacing other companies when their heterodoxy proves right), bad memes spread widely still cause damage. Consider the dust bowl, or the housing crash; both happened under capitalist models.
But all of this is a bit of a distraction because the fact the communists spread wealth around doesn't imply spreading wealth is communist. Indeed, the US, while actively engaging in McCarthyist anti-communist suppression of free speech, had a maximum marginal tax rate of 91% and was fifteen years into its own project of guaranteeing a basic income (via social security) for the elderly, because we as a society had grown weary of the elderly dying from poverty when the winds of fortune had blown them to a circumstance where they had no savings and no ability to work. Even capitalist societies agree that taxation and use of taxes for social benefit is a good thing; the only argument to be had is how much, and "taxing the rich is communist" is a doorstop meme that doesn't contribute to that conversation.
Its interesting you keep using the word ‘redistribution’ for social services, when capitalism is by definition a redistribution from the poor to the rich. It’s also demotivating for people to be trapped in poverty while their employers’ relative slice of the pie is growing year by year. Capitalism may well have slightly democratized the wealth generation process compared to some authoritarian regimes, and some economies have increased average standard of living while doing well under Capitalism, it’s not all bad, but there is certainly lots and lots and lots of room to improve. It’s also interesting to put the onus on the poor to be motivated, in a system designed by the rich that begins to fail, and we take corrective action, if our unemployment goes too low.
There is nothing to redistribute when we all have nothing - and that is our initial state. Then through capitalism value is created. Part of said value is retained by its creator - thus providing the motivation to create it in the first place. But the most value is distributed in the society (through regular consuming of goods and services), raising its level and thus pulling more people out of poverty.
Just check out how dramatically poverty was reduced when Eastern European states switched from communism to capitalism.
I though the poor were living from social security checks.
Working people trade labor for money. Are you claiming that you cannot make surplus from a salary? It seem you're claiming agreed upon salary is preventing you accumulating capital and the rich are to be blamed somehow.
Which question were you attempting to answer there? I assume it’s how does capitalism create value. Unfortunately, you just described labor, something common to all economic systems including communism. This doesn’t address how capitalism creates value.
Repeating your answer doesn’t help much. Have you studied any economics? Unfortunately, that’s not what capital means, it squarely contradicts the definitions of capital and of capitalism, and again, completely fails to answer the question. Communists have heads, hands, and environments. So do socialists, and feudalists, and aboriginal tribes, and, well, everyone. If you’re interested in learning how capitalism creates value, here are a couple of places you might start: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/capitalism.asphttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism
>>Communists have heads, hands, and environments. So do socialists, and feudalists, and aboriginal tribes, and, well, everyone.
Of course they do, but they aren't allowed to use them to their full potential.
I don't think you have read your own links. Hint: read the first sentence of your wikipedia link. And yes I have partially studied economics and have family members who are trained economists.
Poor people have labour. Everybody labours in a company (except the shareholders) and then everybody is paid a wage and the shareholders keep the profit. Thus the rich get richer as the surplus value created by labour is kept by capital.
That's the core mode of capitalist production, better known as the M-C-M' cycle.
I'd love to know where this has actually happened. It seems to me that this idea is often trotted out as a conservative scare tactic.
I'd also like to know how you think we should maximise people's happiness and wellbeing. Because that's my primary interest, and economic productivity is valuable insofar as it enables that utility maximisation.
Taxes are rising around the globe in developed countries. Also red tape and regulations which are a different type of "tax" with the same result: demotivating value creators.
You can't maximise happiness by definition. Happiness is fleeting, a peak, it exists only through comparison to our regular state. Evolution made sure of that, or we'd've stopped evolving. The only way to cheat it is with drugs.
I want to maximise humankind's potential instead. Gain infinite knowledge, spread through the stars. I think that is a much more worthwhile goal than happily dying out on a small planet at the edge of the galaxy.
I don't mean happiness like the temporary pleasure state. I mean the minimisation of undesired suffering and maximisation of freedom for all people to pursue their preferences.
I don't think "potential" is worth anything if it isn't used to benefit people and make their lives better. The imperium from 40k has much greater technology and planet span than us but it's deeply dystopic - I'd rather live here than there.
I also think minimising suffering and maximising freedom are worthwhile goals. I just don't think using the State power is the way to do it.
But I believe becoming multi-planetary is imperative and urgent for mankind. The dangers while all of us are on the same planet are simply too great to sit and enjoy the view.
I'm an anarchist so I'm inclined to agree with you about state power - but in terms of relative goodness, a social democracy is demonstrably better than a neoliberal state. I can say that from experience of Conservative rule in the UK - essential public services just get worse and the savings are collected in the pockets of the already-wealthy.
I do agree about becoming multiplanetary too, but if we're talking about existential risk then climate change is the most urgent one and we need state power and institutional change to avert that one.
Don't judge governing systems using a small number of countries, try to look at more. For example, with their work ethic maybe Nordics can arguably make Social Democracy work, but would it work in say Bulgaria?
The only way to solve climate change is through technological evolution. I see almost zero progress with policy changes. BTW, we wouldn't even be in this mess if would've completed the previous energy tech transition from hydrocarbons to nuclear as planned. What stopped us? Politics.
You need a taxable base to implement social democracy - so yeah you'd need a functioning economy in order to fund social services, and Bulgaria is, AFAIK, pretty corrupt. But solving corruption is a political issue.
We'd also need to move off of ICE cars, and it was the car industry that tried to suppress that. Also the fossil fuel industry that puts out propaganda against new forms of energy - capital and the state are in alliance. Some parties can be better (left wing ones) but there's a ton of propaganda against them by corporations too.
I lived under communism so please don't tell me about left-wing parties. Not that I find other-wing parties that much better, but leftists have destroyed countries.
Politicians are by definition corruptible - that is why they are there. They failed to succeed through merit in the free market so politics is their last resort. That is why power to the State and politicians means yielding to corruption.
The biggest opponents to nuclear were not corporations but parties: greens and ecologists. Ideologists and luddites. We are living the world the anti-nukes protests of the 60's built.
Yeah I don't consider Marxist-Leninists to be part of the left wing - I know they declare themselves to be, but in reality they're just petty tyrants who want to dominate others. By left wing parties I mean labour, green and democratic socialist parties.
Politicians are corruptible, but the free market actively promotes corruption - when the only motive is profit, morality goes out the window in favour of the dollar.
As I said I'd rather we had neither, but between the two only politics has the possibility of significant change in any direction that isn't inherently profitable.
Profit is the only motive for everyone, all the time, no matter what. The only difference is that in a free market that motivation is aligned with societal goals and it is in the open, a game with rules and laws. Free markets allow you to make a profit and keep it, legally.
Without free markets, the deals are made in power and influence, in fiefs and networks. Leftist politics are not only ipocrit (no left politician cares for "the poor") but also feudalistic and corrupt by default, from definition, because that is the only way to make a profit in such a sistem.
That's quite the negative view of humanity. People only care about profit? I care about the wellbeing of all people, and I think most people do, they just have little ability to help others because they are atomised as individuals with little power under capitalism. A society where everybody only cares about personal gain is a society of sociopaths - granted, that's the sociological influence of neoliberalism, so you can see in more neoliberal communities that people are more greedy and materialistic, but that's not an essential trait of human beings; just experience more communal cultures or groups, or check out historical social structures. The only reason many people are profit-oriented now is because they're pushed to be so under capitalism.
You remind me of the communists of 30 years ago. They also kept talking about the "new man" which altruistically worked to the max of his powers for the betterment of mankind and everyone else, while keeping for him only what the state deemed he needed.
They were also very frustrated that the regular people were… simply not like that.
Given that capitalism describes a mode of production, it literally is still capitalism. Capitalism is not feudalism in that serfdom is not the primary working relationship between classes in capitalism - though Yanis Varoufakis seems to think that we're headed that way.
> Given that capitalism describes a mode of production, it literally is still capitalism
Given that redistributive taxation and benefit systems labelled “social democracy” designed specifically to mitigate the adversity that provides the whip behind the capitalist mode of production modify both the property system and the mode of production that together are labelled “capitalism”, social democracy literally is not capitalism. It retains substantial elements of the property system of, and it's mode of production has important similarities to that of, the system for which the term “capitalism” was coined (as does that system with pre-capitalist aristocratic systems), but it's not the same system.
It's not Marxist socialism, either, and I know Marxists like to deny that any system that isn't pre-capitalist that fails to be Marxist socialism can be anything other than capitalism-under-a-different-name, but that's a giant false dichotomy.
A mixed economy still has private property and the capitalist-worker class dynamic, still experiences the crisis cycle - so it's still capitalist, it's just a better form of it. If your qualifying rules for "capitalism" require no welfare system whatsoever, then capitalism hasn't existed in the West for at least 100 years.
Bearing in mind that I'm using "capitalism" as a descriptor, not a snarl word. The snarl one is "neoliberalism" ;)
I conceptualize it as a cryptocurrency w/ single identity, a max wallet amount (10 million perhaps -the rest is taxed 100%), and a utilization score...basically where those who make more transactions and hold less in their wallet get more UBI paid into it... then there just needs to be a mechanism to make the coin 'stable' to where 1 coin is about a loaf of bread... it'd need to maybe have separate account types though and gets a little murky around how businesses accept the coin.... and how that plays into the max-limit (goal being to limit inequality..and basically have a max un-equalness, where you've essentially "won the monopoly game" and now you can go out and help others win too...).
This would be a plausible argument if automation of farming agriculture resulted in 90% of the population being destitute (the vast majority of humans used to work in agri). On the contrary, extreme poverty is at the lowest level ever since agricultural automation was introduced.
So, I don't buy this argument. Huge, society changing automation has happened already. We didn't need UBI, and people were lifted out of poverty in huge numbers.
This time around, factory and transporation automation will drive the price of commodity goods like food and electronics to just above the cost to create them. After we have an end-to-end automated food production line (from farms, to trucks, to warehouses, to supermarkets, to homes) then the price of food will be so cheap that it's almost free.
That's aside from the fact that UBI is not possible economically (it would plunge the disabled into poverty by reducing their welfare, as well as tank the entire government budget). Most UBI proposals would cost in excess of 100% of the US government budget. Which means, no more healthcare, no more roads, no more firefighters.
> Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit only its owners.
The way tech has been heading I'm guessing robots will primarily benefit the manufacturers. Sure, the wealthy will be able to afford to replace workers with machines and use robots for domestic labor, but the entire time those devices will be spying on their "owners" and reporting everything back to the manufacturers and the state. All of that data will be used by companies to make themselves richer at every opportunity and used by the state to keep uppity citizens in line or discredit them before they can threaten the establishment.
I can't say if we'll need basic income or if such a scheme would work (I'd like to see even one example of it working in a society somewhere) but no mater what it means for the workforce I'd be willing to bet the future of automation is going to enrich a very small number of people at the expense of the vast majority
> Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit only its owners.
With basic income, that's still true.
With fair (rather than preferentially lower) taxes on capital income, that potentially changes, whether or not you have basic income; funding BI with it is just a way of making sure that the taxation isn't redirected back to benefit the same elites.
How does the economics look for that? It would seem many would be disincentivized to work, which would raise wages in order to attract work, which would make the basic income worth less.
>It would seem many would be disincentivized to work
If you want Netflix, eating out at a restaurant, playing Games or any sort of entertainment? If you want a life, you need to work. There is nothing disincentivized against work unless those people want to live like zombies.
I think that's something we can't claim or know without the actual UBI proposal.
If it's half the price to run a robot compared to using a human, then jobs can be eliminated even if the people want to work.
I hate my job. If they started a UBI that actually covered all the basics - food, housing, healthcare, etc... I would quit and I'm not even in a low paying job.
I think the difference is Quality of Life. For example, I consider 1 loaf of bread per day and 1 block of butter per month. Living inside a 6m2 room.
That is what I would considered as basic. It is suppose to keep you alive. Not for you to afford meat, fruit or coca cola. Housing enough to keep you warm and sleep. Not enough space ( hardly any at 6m2 ) to let you move around. And this means workers would have to be treated better now they have an option to quit without begging for food on the table.
Perhaps it should be enough for everybody to get a tiny home or a few for larger families... or Yurts... so maybe it front-loads a bit of the costs into building/infrastructure -- land/lots and building supplies... so you get like 80k worth up front, then just a food card for groceries after that... eventually they work in healthcare too...
It'd have to be some sort of partnership w/ govt and localities to workout making it so people who need homes the most have easier access to them, by freeing up the land, so they don't need to relocate across country or so it doesn't seem like they're being put in concentration camps or something horrible like that... If I live in a rural town, they need to do something to ensure there's homes for everyone who wants one there somehow. If they need to buy or lease land and throw up some 30k yurts, so be it...
On the bright side those who pay higher rents will probably pay less as there will be a lot more rentals available.
I love coding, I hate coding for others. I want an UBI for selfish reasons so I can work on side-projects full-time until I find something that 'sticks' and so I can work on building a homesteading community w/ other like-minded people when I can afford some land.
Wages would presumably raise prices only in industries that can't be heavily automated. As a result, industries that are automatible will have lower prices, while industries that require human labor will have inflated prices. In the end, those who make close to minimum wage are probably better off, since they can afford more of the automated things, and those who automate things are probably better off since they have more people to sell to. Those who are well off but don't automate things will probably be about even, since they'll need to pay more for human labor, but will receive UBI and automation benefits.
Rising wages means more competition over the same resources, leading to inflation. Even inflation in some industries/products will affect the CPI.
Where would the UBI come from? Presumably it would be from those who automate. This means your claim of lower prices will likely be marginal - the people need to support themselves whether they or a robot does the work. So UBI would mostly offset.
UBI would hopefully come from land-value taxes. This has been debated a lot and seems to be one of the best methods. Another would be making every American turn in their bank accounts into a single account, and slap a limit on how much you can have in there.... whether that's 50 million or 20 billion... piss off the billionaire class for sure, but who cares.
Inequality shouldn't be that out of whack anyways and having a max speed on it could encourage better equality.
Personally if I had UBI I'd work more on side-projects and try to get some recurring income coming in...I'm still trying to do that but it's harder w/ all the distractions of doing client/freelance work..and the depression when I can't meet bills because I'm having a ADHD poor-motivation month, or anti-social-can't be bothered w/ marketing to find new clients month... both of which seem like every month since the Pandemic began...
I'd hope a lot more people would actually go into science fields and do research when they can afford to go to school and have a guaranteed home and basic necessities...
Honestly a utopia to me would see 95% of kids becoming scientists and technologists, the rest in the arts... and everything else being automated and we work on solving things like aging, space travel, and climate change.
> Another would be making every American turn in their bank accounts into a single account, and slap a limit on how much you can have in there.... whether that's 50 million or 20 billion
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of how money works beyond a small $ amount.
Nobody just keeps millions of dollars in a bank account. When you have lots of money, you own businesses which generate income. The value of those businesses is not fixed, but constantly changing, and dependent on the values of other businesses. So it’s very difficult to assess “PersonX has $Y million” because the value of the companies that they own changes all the time.
They might have $300k in cash, $700k in stocks, and be the founder of a company worth $40m, but they can’t just spend or be taxed on that $40m. The company is significantly less valuable without them running it. And if they tried to sell some of it, then the value would drop and they’d be worth even less. But their net worth still says $41m. How do you tax that?
We don’t tax ownership of companies today because it’s WAY too complicated and convoluted, and would cause significant problems. Instead, we tax the transactions. Meaning that if they sell half of their $40m company for $20m, then they have to pay taxes on that $20m that got converted from “fake money” (company valuation) to “real money” (cash from selling). That’s “Capital Gains” and is taxed today.
Or we also currently tax payments, aka dividends. When a company converts value within itself to cash for its owners. If the $40m company makes $4m in profit and pays that out to the founder, they pay income tax on it.
But the fact that they own a company that’s “worth” $40m shows up in their net worth, even though that’s not real money.
Ah, "you will own nothing" accelerated! This seems like the fever dream of a World Economic Forum plutocrat. Let's make it so people will literally never be able to own a house because of prohibitive taxes. This will solidify the domination of those who already have houses, like older generations, while completely selling younger people down the river with the promise of a tiny handout that will be totally devalued by time it reaches you.
Land value tax seems like a terrible idea. The land doesn't generate value, yet you need to some how generate enouhh tax to support people. It seems this would drive down inequality by making everyone poor.
It makes sense to tax money where there is money - income and gains.
> Wages would presumably raise prices only in industries that can't be heavily automated
If it is funded by eliminating the preference for non-labor income in taxes by bringing up taxes on other income (which also itself reduces the incentive to automation created by premium taxes on labor), that's not true.
Compared to means-tested aid with duplicative bureaucracy to that which already exists for income taxation? Depends on a number of factors, including whether you find it by closing the gap between labor and non-labor taxes so that you aren't punishing people for hiring, whether and how you adjust minimum wage in light of it, how you set the level of basic income relative to productive capacity, whether you index it to a revenue stream divided among the eligible population, or target a constant real income level, or set the level by some other means, etc.
> many would work on various useless things instead of on what the society needs to be done.
Do you honestly believe that is not happening now in ghastly amounts?
That is basically the definition of market failure, which is of course an acknowledged problem with the current economic system we have. That's why people are discussing alternatives.
If the vast majority quit their jobs to take UBI instead, the wage to UBI ratio would go up, since employers would have to pay more to attract the workers that have alternatives. So some of the people would be lured back to the job market because of increased wages. The job market would find a new equilibrium (with wages likely higher than they are now). Prices would also go up, but likely not enough to completely offset the UBI (since velocity of money will increase - we're redistributing wealth from those with low propensity to spend to those with a higher propensity).
Basically, what we had during the pandemic was a mini-UBI experiment (even though it was not universal). Wages at the low end went up - exactly what you would want to see under a successful UBI program (because of giving people alternatives). Unfortunately, we funded this one via deficits (hence why the rich also got richer). If it was funded via a tax, we'd see the lower end wages increase, and the upper middle/upper class get squeezed a bit (which is completely intentional).
The last effect would likely trigger a voting backlash (since upper-middle/upper class folks have lots of voting power), but it's still UBI working as intended
I believe you are describing inflation. That is, indeed one of the possible outcomes of UBI (negating it in the process) and is what we actually got helicoptering money during the pandemic.
Not quite means-tested, since it was related to losing your job, but yes, similar. My hunch is that UBI would not really affect behavior at the upper end of the scale (a millionaire wouldn't change consumption much after getting a UBI check), so for all practical purposes, it was a worthwhile experiment.
> It does for the vast majority who will choose to happily live under the UBI level.
Even if the vast majority did make that decision (which I don't think is plausible under any UBI that would be sustainable in even the very short term in the near future) it would eliminate wage signals it would be a result of shifted wage signals, and the response of the market to those signals.
Lots of comments, as usual for this topic, suffering from what I call "The broken glazier fallacy".
In "the broken glass fallacy", windows are smashed. In "the broken glazier fallacy", it's the glaziers who essentially have their arms broken (or at least, their modern tools are confiscated).
Automation does not harm the economy or populace at large.
The issue is not automation, but the *speed* of automation.
We just need to create new jobs faster than we displace then.
> The robot arm performs a simple, repetitive job: lifting a piece of metal into a press, which then bends the metal into a new shape. And like a person, the robot worker gets paid for the hours it works.
So they hired Bender Bending Rodriguez. Fair enough.
More seriously, seems like the job market is in a perfect storm for more robots to be hired in workers’ steads. They’re not subject to “vaccine or testing mandates”, in fact they won’t even get COVID, they’re not going to unionize, and they’re not going to quit on you.
This assumes we keep them just complex enough for the job. If computer scientists and developers make Bender too smart or cloud connect them, they may decide to hold a union vote. There was a trial in the science fiction show Star Trek the Next Generation to decide if Lt. Commander Data an android had rights and he won. Curious how far away such a scenario might be.
>> They’re not subject to “vaccine or testing mandates”, in fact they won’t even get COVID, they’re not going to unionize, and they’re not going to quit on you.
No, but in this article they are being rented by the hour. Once you become dependent on them, their price will go up to whatever some outside company wants it to be - probably a bit above minimum wage and that's only in places where the work area hasn't yet been redesigned with the robot in mind. This will be danger until the robots become more of a commodity item, but that may eventually happen.
Maybe, but at this point in time I have no reason to think that the robot market will be uncompetitive and insulated from other sectors of the economy. Robot-rentals only need to be cheaper than the cost of the employee and deliver the same or approximately the same value to be competitive.
> More seriously, seems like the job market is in a perfect storm for more robots to be hired in workers’ steads. They’re not subject to “vaccine or testing mandates”, in fact they won’t even get COVID, they’re not going to unionize, and they’re not going to quit on you.
And, unlike labor with payroll tax, you don't pay special supplemental taxes on automation rental.
Although I should at least point out that while true now, there’s nothing inherent to robots that insulates them from this. Tax policy is a human choice, so while not paying payroll taxes is an advantage for hiring a robot over a person today, that doesn’t stop human governments from enacting robot taxes.
> there’s nothing inherent to robots that insulates them from [taxation]
If automation really takes off and entire factories can be run by a handful of people it might make sense to move them to whatever low-tax country with a port. Pay the 5 employees running it extra to fly in there for a few months a year each (like oil workers) and if it's in a lawless region add some automatic turrets that shoot at anything unauthorized entering the perimeter. Makes sense as long as extra pay+extra shipping+ammo costs is less than the hypothetical robot taxes.
Oh, wow. Wasn't expecting hardware automation by the title. Figured this would be a piece on how a lot of soloproneurs and SMBs are beginning to use No-Code tools like Integromat and Zapier. I'm an ex-software developer, and I even prefer to use Integromat these days as opposed to writing something myself.
So I worked on robots for a fair bit of my career before quitting because the reality just didn't mesh with the hype. I've worked on self-driving cars, computer vision applications for automated surveillance, physical robots for warehouse automation similar to what is being described in this article, and more.
This is ignoring all the problems with these systems. Workplace injuries are completely ignored, and I have never worked somewhere with a physical robot that did not harm someone at some point, no matter how seriously safety was taken. The reality is, with current tech (which is always improving!) that robots are more dangerous - full stop.
It talks about the simplicity of these systems which is true, but the problem is they're so simple something as weird as changing the color of the box can completely break the system with no resolution. I made up that example because I can't talk about real things that broke the workflow for warehouse automation companies due to NDAs, but they were equally stupid. Basically if you wanted to change anything then the robot usually had to be scrapped and redesigned, which costs millions and takes months or even years.
It mentions the theoretical gains of using cheaper robots to replace expensive labor, and this is how these systems are sold to everyone who has never really worked with robots. Speaking for the robotics company, the upfront cost of the robot was usually more than they ever recouped from revenue. When you factor in the cost of maintenance (these robots are monitored by people that make a lot of money), not to mention the R&D then it never turned a profit. Speaking for the warehouses, they would frequently complain about the robots breaking, the inability to get work done, and the biggest complaint was "it's worse than the humans it's supposed to replace."
The technology just isn't there yet. I don't know when it will be. If you are interested in research then robotics is a fascinating field. If you are trying to make money by solving real problems that aren't subsidized by VC then it's demoralizing as hell. Most robotics companies never make a good product. Amazon has Kiva Systems which work great, but you'd be surprised that most of their competitors still never figured out how to have positive margins on their products. iRobot had the Roomba which is still going strong with lots of competitors. There are a handful of companies that sell robotic arms that make money. There are a handful of companies that sell sensors that make money (a lot less than you'd think). There are contracts you can get with the military that usually go nowhere. Rodney Brooks, who cofounded iRobot, failed with his cobots approach at Rethink Robotics. There are lots of other failures I haven't mentioned as well.
Robots have a long way to go before they're seriously competing with humans.
When looking at robotics is also good to consider not just economics but safety. There are situations you simply don't want to put a human into where robotics shine, usually in some form of emergency response in hazardous situations. Not only is it acceptable to be more expensive than its human counterpart, it's often acceptable to be a lot worse at the task. In cases where a robot is saving human suffering or doing something incredibly dangerous, robotics can be a rewarding field. I've done some limited robotics work in emergency response and you can tell people up front "listen, this stuff isn't great, but it may save some lives" and be completely honest.
The Fukushima reactor exploration for example is only possible because of robotics. Those things are failing like flies due to radiation but it's clearly worth it.
I love what you're preaching, but I actually worked on something similar to what you're describing (just not for nuclear reactors, but something else famously dangerous). Ultimately the company footing the bill decided to axe the project because they decided they'd rather send people into a deadly environment rather than continue to pay for the R&D to develop the robot.
> When looking at robotics is also good to consider not just economics but safety.
The problem is the companies paying for the robots only care about economics, at least in my experience. I'm glad your experience differs from mine.
//Amazon has Kiva Systems which work great, but you'd be surprised that most of their competitors still never figured out how to have positive margins on their products.
I'm slightly limited by what I can say, but it mostly comes down to three things. Amazon has more scale, better vertical integration, and their tech actually works better.
If only they hadn't sabotaged the Universal Basic Income that Richard Nixon proposed back in the 1970s, this would be pretty much good news, instead of more to worry about.
I think UBI will be necessary at some point, but I'm not thrilled with the idea of millions of us spending all their waking hours on Netflix and DoorDash.
Are you thrilled with the idea of more creative output being a result of UBI?
There's a lot of great stuff that could happen if people weren't chained to wage slavery and could lean on UBI to pursue passions. Sure there will be people that sit on their ass and do nothing, but there will also be people who use their new found freedom to create great things that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
I'd also like to point out that even the most radical UBI proponents aren't pushing for a truly substantial benefit. Most of the proposals I've seen are payments that would be near poverty level if it was treated as a sole income for any length of time.
Compared to today, where we do useless crap like making $5+ coffee cups or sort JIRA tickets or move numbers around from one database to another?
The assumption that a company cranking out an iPhone every year is inherently "better for the evolution of humanity" than more people writing or making videos is one I'd question.
Evolutionary pressure seems to mainly create animals that focus more plainly on food and reproduction than modern humanity, after all!
Except the tasks you name are manufacturing organizing, and preparing for workload. These are required tasks for a firm to meet their demand, even divorced from all other context and embedded in your specified tooling.
They are "required" in that they are useful to the business.
I'm suggesting that "useful to a business" is currently over-prioritized compared to "useful to an individual." (And yes, it's driven by consumers, but if one's basic needs were met without working 8+ hours a day, maybe those individuals would have different preferences.)
And I think the claim that it's evolutionary necessary for us to have today's model of firms and full time employment is particularly out there.
What part of useless jobs in a contrived economic system which forces people to grind their life away futily trying to get ahead is related to evolutionary pressures?
Unless UBI's crazy-high, it's still going to be plenty appealing to work to have money for entertainment, travel, social signaling, better services/opportunities for your kids, to attract mates, et c. I have exactly no idea where people worried about some mass refusal to work at all are coming from.
Sounds like projection, then. I chose to take 6 months off between contracts, and within a week I was bored. That period turned out to be the most productive period when it comes to my open source projects, and those projects now have thousands of users who find them useful. Most people want to feel accomplishment, appreciation and a sense of responsibility, and many people create or work towards that end.
I have a friend I made in college who is now on disability. She's using the time to learn and create, and preparing to start a business teaching others what they know. They could easily smoke weed and play video games all day, but that gets old very quickly.
Is that why stock trading and memecoins skyrocketed during the period where stimulus checks and enhanced unemployment benefits were rolled out? Or why video games reached record player counts during the pandemic (sure sounds like people who had nothing to do all day decided to play video games instead of do whatever productive thing you think they would have done!)?
And to add on to that - what makes you think UBI simply won't cause rents to go up to match? We have strong evidence from the current inflation situation that broad based wage gains get eaten up by price increases of goods with limited supply (i.e. the housing situation in every coastal city). Existing UBI experiments aren't widespread enough to materially shift the housing market. You can't go off evidence from giving a few hundred people extra money. And basic economics tells us that oligopolies (the rental market in coastal cities) extract all consumer surplus (the UBI money) because an oligopoly is not a properly functioning market.
Sounds like what I do every day after work, because I'm too beat to do anything else.
Given time off and no obligations, I always intend to use all of it on that... but damned if I don't start doing useful things on day 2, instead.
[EDIT] FYI, last I heard, states have been quietly letting people scam their way onto the disability rolls to make up for our official social safety net being totally inadequate, after the '08 financial crisis. You might look into that.
We have not escaped evolutionary pressures, and I'll argue that DNA-based life as we know it will never be able to escape them. Mutations will happen and selection will happen, even if those selection pressures fluctuate.
As natural life, everything we do is inherently natural.
It always amuses me to see futurists with no experience in biology or life sciences and a master's in CS try to extrapolate the future of humanity and society. Some of the worst trends in modernity are based around unqualified individuals with platforms trying to impose their will of the future on the masses (think Elon and his ridiculous tunnels, billionaires building "smart cities" in the desert, etc)
> We are the result of evolution and without evolutionary pressure we will fail.
Who cares if they do nothing, write blogs, and post to TikTok? This feels like a get off my lawn type of grievance.
We have endured far worse as a species than a mass of people with time and money to do whatever they want. It is pure arrogance to even meekly assert _you_, someone occupying such a thin sliver of time in human history knows what precise machinations will irreversibly ruin us as a species.
It’s not meaningless is someone else is willing to pay you a wage to do it. It may be repetitive, boring and crappy, but it has a meaning for the employer.
The Dole gave us Harry Potter, you know. It also gave us Oasis. I'm sure that Britons can give you lots more examples.
Given that most creative output comes from a very small number of people, releasing even a tiny fraction of those people from the basic drudgery of life should result in a cultural explosion.
I would even argue that it would significantly help our current political problems. A lot of political discourse is driven by people who have unstructured idle time--retired or unemployed. UBI would allow people who currently have to struggle to support themselves to engage with the political system.
I dont have sources but I've read studies of the creative output of people who only do work when feeling inspired creative motivated and whatnot vs those who do purely out of discipline and habit. And even same people in different moods. And there is no discernable difference in output.
Its a feel good assumption but you don't need any of those things to create beautiful things
Because a society in which everything that needs to be done is getting done - is stagnating. A progressive society always discovers (or invents!) new things needing to be done. And somebody needs to do those things.
> Because a society in which everything that needs to be done is getting done - is stagnating
Is that really the worst thing in the world? In an age driven by hyper consumerism and buying new shiny iPhones and other gadgets, do we really need to do more? Can't we just be happy with our accomplishments as a human race and just enjoy? I for one would welcome a stagnant society.
Maybe us or other citizens of the West can be happy and enjoy our immensely affluent life styles but the great majority of the population of this planet is far from this level and quite eager to reach it. The planet cannot support that.
Also, humanity's eggs are currently all on one basket - we're one major cataclismic event from complete obliteration.
No, the challenges ahead require us to keep evolving, we cannot afford to stagnate.
I know this is anecdotal, I know it doesn't matter. But I just have to say, I watch more TV and order more food when I'm working. When I take a long break, I tend to cook meals, bake bread, work in my yard, and work on side projects. When I'm working I'm too tired at the end of the day to cook, I order in, and I'm too tired to work in my yard, I watch Netflix.
I'm not thrilled with dividends and profits expropriated from the surplus labor time of those of us who work and create wealth by the
1%r heirs spending millions on ski slopes in Aspen, Zermatt or beaches on the French Riviera.
What you were doing before is still happening, if it was automated. Any small benefit you produce for society when you’re taking a break from smoking weed is a net positive for society compared to if you still had to spend all your time robotically doing your meaningless old job.
I do not think we’ll ever manage to automate everything. The more we automate, the more stuff to be done we’ll discover or invent. Not the old job, but many new ones.
This is true for tweaking and was certainly true for industrial automation.
However the danger is if you cut human input/involvement altogether. That is what AI will be if successful. Everyone except the business owner will be uninvolved (apart from futile protests).
Weed and games are fun. Spiritually fulfilling work is fun until about 10%, then you have to document the code, write tests, do marketing, answer support and so on…
> I think UBI will be necessary at some point, but I'm not thrilled with the idea of millions of us spending all their waking hours on Netflix and DoorDash.
Why would eliminating the benefit cliff produced by means-tested welfare result in fewer people working for income above the basic support level? Reducing the disincentive for additional work on top of minimum support is a major motivation for moving to BI from means-tested welfare.
Just because we all can think of millions of examples of humans acting terribly doesn’t mean we are vindicated in judging the character of hundreds of millions of people on the behaviors shown in videos of people on what is likely the worst day of their life.
Time to discuss the paradigm shift in how people, especially the ones traditionally in these low paying jobs are supposed to support themselves in the next generation.
The article also quotes them as saying they’re not going to lay people off but also probably not going to hire more employees given this option so future workers are left out. And I imagine that position won’t age well as they may not backfill people who leave if not actively lay people off sooner than later.
Possibly, but doubtful if we view the full effect. It says that it eliminates the need to hire new workers. What is the next generation to do if the jobs don't exist?
Let's talk about realilistic stuff. Do you think that minimum wage workers are suited for being astronauts? Maybe a small subset can be trained for it, but many probably cannot.
Genera idea is that goods and services get ever cheaper.
If your not overly picky (beans and rice) have gotten so cheap that world hunger is already a solved problem. Distribution less so.
If you can setup a Von Neumann machine that worked In the middle of the desert. eventually you could have hundreds of cities ready for move in. So very cheap.
In the case of healthcare, it's partly the cost of technology - a generation ago there were no MRIs, drugs were less complex, etc. The quality and outcomes have massively improved in many areas.
Even with housing, you have material costs and labor costs. Everyone talks about density, but if someone isn't working with a UBI, then they can live in the middle of nowhere. Most of the housing issues are really a personal choices and labor location.
I have a feeling they are going to be shifts to have people either level up wiht their technical skills and work on advanced problems and some people who cannot level up but can still be used in lower level data work where automation is really difficult.
There's plenty of work to do: maintaining public infrastructure (buildings, parks, gardens, etc) and taking care of people (sick, elderly, disabled, young).
I guess we will have a lot more public sector jobs.
The promised that AI would replace dangerous work but instead it ruthlessly manages disposable workers till they get damaged and then disposes off them because that’s cheaper than actually automation.
