You are right, just like AI that writes finance and sports articles would never displace journalists. Oh, hold on, it has. But surely a robotic assembly line would never replace honest and hard working American automotive workers..... just don't look at Detroit for conformation of that theory. At least all of our secretary and typist jobs are still safe..... well, not so much, but still, surely one can always go to a pharmacist school and get a high paying job after that. Right. What, AI is doing that now too, and better than humans ever could? Na....
Change is coming, and there are too many people who wish to hide their head in the sand rather then embrace this change, and figure out how to deal with it. We need a new economic model, because capitalism isn't going to work in a world where everything is created by machines (capital) and consumers have nothing of value to exchange for the goods that capital is producing. I am not arguing for communism, because we all know how well that has worked in the past. We need another solution.
Unless, if AI is going to replace all the labor, why not also replace the consumers with AI :)
I never said that change wasn't coming. I said drivers would remain. There are still pilots.
High quality auto-pilots have been around for at least 20 years in airbus. Planes capable of flying and landing for longer than that (takeoff is harder than landing because the plane needs to know what the wind is doing).
Pilots are around to deal with exceptional circumstances and to accept responsibility (loading, security, risk assessment, maintenance, health). The same will happen with trucks. The risk is entirely different with a commercial enterprise than it is with an individual, and corporations are very happy to spend money to avoid risk. Yes, it's a conflation of the management roles of the Captain, with the task roles of Pilot, but there will be a person, and we will say they fly it, and if there are humans on the plane, they will be on it.
Pilot and co-pilot add (rough estimate) $200/hr to a flight cost. There are 140 people on the plane (United A320), so it adds $12 per person to have two pilots on the plane for a flight across the US.
> I am not arguing for communism, because we all know
> how well that has worked in the past. We need another
> solution.
Do you have any ideas? Capitalism uses the market to allocate resources. Typically, when someone pitches an alternative it will boil down to some variation of government reallocation. This has many names, but all of them are a breeding ground for corruption and injustice.
Maybe we haven't been looking hard enough.
What if we start with your premise: capitalism is failing some regions. To avoid ending back at government-reallocation, we could add to it a second premise: the purpose of government is to enforce live-and-let-live and do absolutely no more.
Within these rules, can we find something new? It might help to stop seeing government as a God-Object to stick new functionality into, and instead consider whether there should be other objects in play.
So far I've got nothing. But I find myself thinking of business models, rather than social reform.
the problem with communism was that it tried almost 100% government management and planning. Private iniative was forbidden, even in the areas in which it would be useful. (source: I grew up in a socialist/communist country)
In that manner, capitalism with guaranteed income is different. You want to be rich, go ahead amd try your chances at trade, entrepreneurship etc. You see a market opportunity - go ahead and kickstart it. On the other hamd, if you lack a capability, or you prefer to do things that nobody will want to pay you for (art, raising children etc), the govrnment will keep you covered.
Obviously there are problems to it, especially today when production costs are expensive. And there are implementation problems as well. But still, one system is the ultimate oppression, another one is ultimate freedom.
Btw. The running joke in communism was: "yeah, our system is perfect, it's just the implememtation that sucks". I believe that communism was impossible to get implemented correctky, whereas capitalism + minimum income can be. Not today, but in a few years when the goods will be even cheaper.
If I remember well the texbooks, communism is about common ownership of the means of production (typically factories), not about personal private property or money.
I bet I would have been executed back at the time of the October revolution for saying this, but you could have a market even with communism: if nobody want apples and everybody like oranges, guess what is going to be cultivated and what's going to cost more? It doesn't matter that the state (the people) owns all the apple and orange trees and processing factories. They'll allocate resources as the market want.
Unfortunately communism almost always came with central planning, maybe because the guys in charge were often dictators and, as you wrote, private initiative was not well received. Furthermore they had to differentiate from capitalism as much as they could (that was marketing), and anything remotely looking capitalistic was forbidden.
The problem with communism was that people were locked-out of the decisions. They had no idea what's going on. The reason for that was not that the leadership imposed it. It worked out that way, because the government made a promise to the common people:
"We will take care of your needs, you just be as productive as you can. You will be happy, we will take care for you".
So the people did. The government gave bread to the masses and the masses didn't care about much else. The ones who cared about more were deemed to be dangerous to the communist society and were killed.
How is the promise made by basic income proponents different that the communist promise?
Capitalism uses the market to allocate resources, but it is not the only system that does so: [1][2][3]
From what I can gather, you're limiting the role of government to a very libertarian role, and not finding any feasible solutions.
Why abandon government reallocation? To the contrary, many forms of government reallocation specifically counter injustices, for example, any Pigou tax.
Regulation is also a good thing, as it allows the citizenry to enact constraints on companies where consumer action would be toothless.
Your software-writing fingers are controlled by a neural network - a pretty complicated one, but it is still a physical process. I am sure an artificial neural network will be able to approximately do the same within a few decades. Not soon, but even we, software developers, are not safe. Well, we are today, and we will be among the last ones, but it will not last forever.
I think the key to save ourselves is to create artificial brains that are hardwired to _like_ taking care of us humans. I see flaws in every other solution. And even this one is not totally safe, just my best shot.
Change is coming, and there are too many people who wish to hide their head in the sand rather then embrace this change, and figure out how to deal with it. We need a new economic model, because capitalism isn't going to work in a world where everything is created by machines (capital) and consumers have nothing of value to exchange for the goods that capital is producing. I am not arguing for communism, because we all know how well that has worked in the past. We need another solution.
Unless, if AI is going to replace all the labor, why not also replace the consumers with AI :)