What To Do After Robots Take Your Job

sarahnaomi writes In 2013, researchers Carl Frey and Michael Osborne of the Oxford Martin School dropped the bombshell that 47 percent of US jobs were at risk of computerisation. Since then, they've made similar predictions for the UK, where they say 35 percent of jobs are at high risk. So what will our future economy look like? "My predictions have enormously high variance," Osborne told me when I asked if he was optimistic. "I can imagine completely plausible, incredibly positive scenarios, but they're only about as probable as actually quite dystopian futures that I can imagine."

In a new report produced as part of a programme supported by Citi, he and Frey outline how increased innovation—read: automation—could lead to stagnation.

Comments

Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[gurps_npc]

All it can do is change the work you do.

I am sick and tired of Luddites that claim robots will steal all the jobs.

Jobs are not a limited resource. Jobs are dependent on things we need to get done.

Once upon the time 100% of jobs were focused on getting food. Hunting and gathering became full time work when population was high. Once farming came around, it freed up some people to do other things. They did not suddenly become lazy do-nothing people. Instead they took up lower priority tasks, and turned them into full time jobs.

Things like clothing manufacturing, which used to be done in your spare time, turned into full industries. New products like shoes, alcohol, luxuries etc. were created.

The question is, are there still things we need to do, but have not been able to afford? The answer to that is YES. We have education, science, space exploration, green technologies, and a host of other things that we has decided would be nice, but we simply don't have the manpower to do.

We will not run out of jobs, instead we will do things that we can not even imagine today. Anymore than a hunter/gatherer could imagine someone would be paid to sell food at a basketball game.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[buchner.johannes]

We will not run out of ideas on what we could work on, but the question is will anyone pay for that work (i.e. need it desperately enough).

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[fishthegeek]

For the most part I agree with you in concept but the spiral does go downward as not all jobs are equal. There has to be an economic incentive to automate a job, and that usually means "expensive." The jobs that can not be automated are generally those jobs where the prevailing wage is lower than the cost of the automation. I am speaking in generalities here not trying to find examples of jobs only "humans" can do.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[evilRhino]

We can only do these things if the robot masters decide they will use the fruits of robot labor to do these things. Why would they pay for any of these things when there are other robot companies to buy out and absorb or politicians to bribe?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Sir_Substance]

Jobs are not a limited resource. Jobs are dependent on things we need to get done.

Our capacity to get things done is increasing in leaps and bounds.

1 farmer today can do the work of a 20 farmers from 200 years ago. Yes, he does it using machines which took a thousand people to design and build, but those machines are made in one factory and used by 10 thousand farmers nationwide.

So 11,000 people today are doing the work of 200,000 from 200 years ago.

Our efficiency is going through the roof. We are already at the break even point in western nations. Unemployment rates are indicative of a society where there is less work than people. We could have everyone working two days a week. Yes that would introduce extra overheads, but we have the excess manpower to manage them, so why not?

This could be a cause for celebration, it's what mankind has always wanted, but here we are with people like you, who can't let go of the 40 hours work week, and you're pushing people into poverty because of it.

Madness.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MickyTheIdiot]

I agree with the basis of this argument in general, but as usual an entire group is forgotten.

We do have people who are not as smart as others. We have a very solid N% of people who will never be knowledge workers, who can't understand complex concepts, etc. In the US, with it's politics going out of control, we've also got a large group of smart people who won't make it because they won't have access to education they need (or the education becomes indoctrination and corporate training instead).

These people have to live somehow. Will we go the "Player Piano" route and guarantee a wage, or we will we go full GOP derp and just hope they die?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Anonymous Coward]

I am sick and tired of the people that think we all need jobs.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MickyTheIdiot]

Not to mention that the removal of the new deal and systematic attack on labor has made sure that the benefirts of that productivity has gone to mostly the top .01%.

George Jetson, on the famous cartoon show, used to complain how long the 3 day work weeks were! Everyone that put in work was supposed to benefit. It isn't working out that way.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bluefoxlucid]

The Luddites were right, though. 60 years of 70% unemployment after the Industrial Revolution.

The question is, are there still things we need to do, but have not been able to afford? The answer to that is YES. We have education, science, space exploration, green technologies, and a host of other things that we has decided would be nice, but we simply don't have the manpower to do.

We have the manpower--what do you think 11% unemployment, 60% labor participation, and severe underemployment are? We don't have the profit motive.

I've already solved the issue anyway. Automation will disrupt our workforce, temporarily; I've adjusted for that. I need to get this implemented, but nobody will listen.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[NixieBunny]

There are all sorts of jobs these days that do not need to be done, such as writing advertising jingles or maximizing the number of times that a person clicks on an ad. Oh, and most of that work being done to build the JSF. I'd rather have us enjoy that leisure time that we were told (by those utopian si-fi novels) would result from robots doing all the essential work.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[unique_parrot]

I wonder if we need AI-politicans, AI-lawyers, AI-managers and AI-share-dealers until everybody realizes that everybody could life a perfect life with a 10 hour/week job...

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[jellomizer]

You cannot win the game unless you are willing to take risks.

A lot of people went broke trying to invent the product and services that we take for granted today. They took a risk, many loss, some won, some won big.

Woz and Jobs put out the idea that people should have personal computers. HP Though that computers were only for business. What if HP was right. We wouldn't have Personal Computers, and never really heard of Woz or Jobs, or Gates and Ballmer....

Many of the technologies that are having a hard time getting funding, isn't about not finding people who will pay for such a technology. But for people to pay for YOUR technology. Your solution may not be ready for prime time yet. But the idea of your type of technology may be ready.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MrL0G1C]

We will not run out of jobs,

If we ever create artificial intelligence greater than that of an average human then over 50% of the population will be redundant forever because the robots will do the jobs cheaper.

Job available, job filled - by a robot, cheaper, get it?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MrL0G1C]

If we create true AI then most of the population will never be able to get a job of any number of hours because robots will be able to do any work they can do for a fraction of the price.

Robots don't need cars, houses, TVs, holidays etc.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[burtosis]

Pretty much yea. It's either hilarious or sad that people take relatively obvious predictions about the future and assume that everything is exactly the same but that prediction when it's beyond obvious that is not a possible scenario. Just like people freaking out about strong AI. Sure a super carrier could wreak havoc in 1400 but it's not a huge deal today. Just like the first AI won't be first for very long at all and by then we will likely will have had far more trouble from augmented humans and human hackers.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Anonymous Coward]

So in a story about a huge chunk of ordinary people's job going away, you talk about Woz, Jobs, Gates, and Ballmer as the archetypes?

Are you saying that the everything will be alright as long as us one-in-a-million innovators stick to our guns and become billionaires? Or that us ordinary folk should hope our betters don't lose their motivation or we're all screwed?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Anonymous Coward]

People can't think outside the box.

A hundred years of automation, robots, computers, surely we should all be working a 10 hour week. But instead we now need men and women working just to keep the system going.

The people running the show have no goal other than to run the show and stuff their pockets full of money, the lack of vision in most of the western world is leading to dystopia.

We should be working towards a sustainable future that puts quality of life above the 'economy'. There will always be an economy, I'd rather be poor with a high quality of life than rich and destroying the planet.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MrL0G1C]

There will be no 10-hour week. The AI gets the job, the human doesn't.

The human does not get a job ever, not more jobs for the human, AI is cheaper.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Anonymous Coward]

They did not suddenly become lazy do-nothing people. Instead they took up lower priority tasks, and turned them into full time jobs.

Interesting that you mentioned lower priority tasks. Lower priority tasks by definition means that the labor to accomplish those tasks will be valued very low compared to tasks of higher priority. It is a lower priority task after all, so people don't really care all that much about whether the task gets done right, in a timely fashion, or even at all. Consequently, payment for those tasks will likely be a pittance, as people do not need it done desperately enough.

Consider how in the current reality, executives and other managers generally have very high wages while the office cleaners make barely enough to support themselves. Making decisions for a company is considered a high priority job with a lot of responsibility. If this task is not done well, the company's daily operations could ground to a halt, or even worse, the company might go under. Even if the cleaners were to disappear, employees can still work there and maybe clean their own desks if needed. Cleaning is thus considered a low priority job.

For this reason I think it would be very difficult to make a full-time and well paying job out of said tasks. Especially when considering all those other people whose job recently became obsolete and which are looking for the same job, driving down wages even further. Take this situation to extremes and it becomes impossible for low-skilled people to even earn enough to buy food, let alone rent a living space.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bondsbw]

Will we go the "Player Piano" route and guarantee a wage, or we will we go full GOP derp and just hope they die?

We can learn something from both the liberal and conservative views. I'd like us to both guarantee a wage, and eliminate the minimum wage.

Let me explain. Minimum wage directly affects only those employers whose business model depends on low-wage, unskilled labor. But wages can be guaranteed directly by society (via government) instead. Take the following example:

You hire someone to take after-hours calls at home, jotting down any messages received. It's a part time job, about 10 hours per week, and typically about 2 or 3 calls an hour come in, and otherwise that employee can do whatever... watch TV, read a book, work on some other job, play games, whatever. You both agree $2/hour is an acceptable wage. But, with minimum wage laws, you're on the hook for $7.25/hour. You decide that is too expensive, and replace the employee with an answering machine. It's not your wish, after all the answering machine lacks true human feedback. And of course, the potential employee doesn't have any job or income. Sucks all around.

Now let's say we push the burden of guaranteed wage on society instead of the employer. Government writes that employee a check for $72.50 every week (10 hours X $7.25 guaranteed wage). The employee also gets $2/hour from the employer. Society gets what it wants by providing employment opportunities to everyone.

So if we are going to redistribute wealth, let's put that burden directly on society instead of placing it on markets and industries that thrive with unskilled labor.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bondsbw]

Sorry for the formatting issues... I submitted with the first line inside quote tags but they didn't show up after submitting. And the non-beta side of Slashdot is for whatever reason cutting off the last half of the post.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[LifesABeach]

How's that working for you?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Jason Levine]

I am sick and tired of Luddites that claim robots will steal all the jobs.

In the Luddites' defense, technology often "takes away" specific jobs that some people might have been doing their whole lives. If you were working in a profession for 30 years and that was all you knew, an invention that rendered it moot would be scary. All of a sudden, you'd be out of a job - possibly for good as few companies would be willing to completely retrain you when they could get someone new for cheaper (and who might know the new technology).

Of course, the Luddites miss the long term view. They look at that those people left behind the technological curve and say "technology steals all of our jobs" while ignoring all of the new jobs being opened up. I definitely feel for those whose line of work is suddenly made irrelevant by technology, but that's not a reason to hold technology back.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Wycliffe]

Technology can NOT eliminate work. All it can do is change the work you do.

This only holds as long as someone is willing to give you food/money for your work.
The problem we're seeing today is that 90% of the stuff people want and need is produced by a handful of people.
Food is provided by just a few farmers. Software is written once by a handful of people and cloned millions of time.
Movies are created once and cloned millions of times. Millions of people all watch the same handful of ball players.
What happens when you have no useful skills to barter with because a robot can do the work cheaper?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MrL0G1C]

How is Fred going to be able to get a job if a robot can do any job he can do for less money?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Anonymous Coward]

This could be a cause for celebration, it's what mankind has always wanted, but here we are with people like you, who can't let go of the 40 hours work week, and you're pushing people into poverty because of it.

Madness.

Generally people are working more than 40 hours (in the USA at least). Additionally, the USA also raised the retirement age to 67, So despite automation, we are working longer days and longer lifetimes. Businesses won't let you work fewer hours without taking a cut in pay unless it's mandated by the government. Even then, we've allowed businesses to call every one salaried so that if you decide to work 20 hours a week you'll still probably put in 50 hours.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[ShanghaiBill]

There has to be an economic incentive to automate a job, and that usually means "expensive."

Another way to look at this is that automation makes things so cheap that it is no longer worthwhile to hire a human to make them. If everything is automated, then most things will be far cheaper than they are today. So addressing things like poverty and inequality, will be easier. In America, 60% of households in the bottom quintile (20%) already have no earned income, and overall, bottom quintile households get 40% of their income in government transfer payments. The cost of that is not particular burdensome (most govt spending goes to rich people and corporations, not the poor), and will become much less burdensome in the future. Incomes for the bottom quintile have stagnated since the 1970s, but they are still significantly better off on average. They live in bigger houses, drive safer cars, have better TVs/computers/cellphones/consoles, breathe cleaner air. As automation continues, the poor will likely fall further behind rich in relative terms, but their lives will still improve in absolute terms.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Wycliffe]

For the most part I agree with you in concept but the spiral does go downward as not all jobs are equal. There has to be an economic incentive to automate a job, and that usually means "expensive." The jobs that can not be automated are generally those jobs where the prevailing wage is lower than the cost of the automation. I am speaking in generalities here not trying to find examples of jobs only "humans" can do.

I'm not sure this spiral downward is a given. There are plenty of jobs at the bottom like digging ditches that have been eliminated as well.
Jobs that are not cost effective to automate aren't all at the bottom. I would argue that many of the ones at the bottom will be eliminated
first. Once that spiral hits rock bottom and starts working back up we'll probably all be better off unless we end up with a situation where
there are not enough jobs or the jobs at the top are too difficult to retrain certain people.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[radtea]

This could be a cause for celebration, it's what mankind has always wanted, but here we are with people like you, who can't let go of the 40 hours work week, and you're pushing people into poverty because of it.

There are different ways of stating the problem.

1) "Technology is eliminating jobs! How will we cope with the unemployment?"

2) "Technology is increasing productivity! How will we distribute the gains?"

3) "Technology is reducing total workforce requirements! How will we reduce the work week?"

Each of these assumes a different fixed aspect of the economy. The first assumes that industrial capitalism will chug on, basically unchanged, while unemployment rises to unprecedented levels. History suggests this is unlikely.

The second assumes that productivity gains will continue without the incentive of paid work.

The third assumes that paid work will remain the only way of distributing productivity gains.

The rise of industrial capitalism saw enormous social upheaval. It is likely that the rise of total automation will produce something similar. We have no idea what that will be (I certainly don't) but it's important that we recognize that while not everything will change, everything could, and not confine our imaginary futures too narrowly. We're going to be wrong regardless (because our imaginations are terrible tools for knowing reality) but in this case we're more likely to fail by being too narrow in our view than too broad.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Ravaldy]

Which is why creative jobs are the best jobs. The current AIs that have surfaced that can actually entertain a conversation require ridiculous amounts of processing power which is why we haven't seen AIs take actual jobs yet. Automation is really the only method that has been used to remove some jobs.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[RabidReindeer]

We have education, science, space exploration, green technologies, and a host of other things that we has decided would be nice, but we simply don't have the manpower to do

Education. Already being automated. And offshored.

Space exploration. Automated.

Green technologies. The RNC wants to have words with you, you dirty commie!

Host of other things. Such as????

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[LifesABeach]

Would these robots be 3 Laws Safe?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[tmosley]

Rather than shortening the workweek so my a better idea to move the retirement age forward. You go to school as normal, then work full time for ten years, save enough money that you can live off the interest/afford your own robot whatever to make you passive income, and retire around 30.

Of course, first we need to get the government and its massive debt (and the idiotically low interest rates that result from their complete control of central bank policy ie 0% interest rate policy) out of the way. Otherwise, we'll all just keep having the fruits of our increased productivity redistributed away either to government employees or the 0.01%.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[LifesABeach]

Incorrect, you cannot win the game unless you know the rules.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[RabidReindeer]

Green technologies. The RNC wants to have words with you, you dirty commie!

Oh sorry. I forgot. The proper duck-response to that is "Green Technology kills Jobs!"

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MrL0G1C]

But is it a two way conversation with the AI showing a good level of understanding? The Turing test is a complete fail at measuring whether an AI is actually intelligent or just a good faker.

So far I haven't seen any good AI, got any links?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[gurps_npc]

Wow, I did not know you were a slave master.

Or do you not understand the concept of "Artificial Intelligence"?

Any robot smart enough to truly put 50% of the human population out of work is smart enough to JOIN A UNION.

If the machines are not smart enough to join a union, then they will not be smart enough to put us out of work. If they are smart enough to join a union, we won't be building enough of them to put 50% of us out of work.

Yeah, we might build a few of them to do certain specific jobs like emergency nuclear generator shut off Robot. But not many.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MrL0G1C]

Ps, look at Apple's Siri, Apple have how many hundreds of billions of dollars to make their tech the best? but Siri is the best they can come up with.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Pinky's Brain]

Only as long as the transfer payments increase, yet neo-liberalism seems to be growing more virulent rather than retreating ...

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[jythie]

On the other hand, in each major wave of such innovation what we have generally seen is an increase in mean income but a decrease in median. So each jump creates a small number of well paying jobs and a large number of jobs that pay worse than the displaced positions did. Even within your example, the agricultural revolution was indeed a boon for society on the whole, but the people working the actual agricultural jobs had it worse than when they were hunter gatherers.

And while this sounds great if one pictures themselves being on the winning side of that equation, even when one is not, that increase in misery has a way of translating into things like higher crime rates and decay.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[DocSavage64109]

That actually sounds like a workable plan and sounds better for the poor than just being jobless and 100% government supported.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[tmosley]

Food production and water acquisition are high priority. Playing musical instruments or games for other people to watch is lower priority. Who gets paid more? Farmers and well drillers, or rock stars and professional sports players?

The singularity is kinda like that. Maybe. Probably. Lower priority tasks (ie those things that are higher on Maslow's pyramid: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...) that simply didn't get done before will now get done, and everyone will find it easier to satisfy their values in that world, assuming we haven't all been turned into paperclips.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Ravaldy]

http://abhinavpmp.com/2015/02/...

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[gurps_npc]

People don't need "cars, houses, TVs, holidays etc. We get them because we WANT them, not need them.

Any Robot that is smart enough to put us out of work will be smart enough to join a union and WANT a car, house, TV, Houses.

You basically suffer from paranoia, not logic.

But let's assume you are right. Let's assume that somehow, we (people) are smart enough to

1. Design and build robots that can do 50% of our current jobs

2. Keep ahead of the curve, upgrading all our robots faster than we upgrade our new jobs.

3. But still keep the robots from becoming self aware enough to demand luxuries, good working conditions, etc. etc. etc.

4. and keep it cheaper than a human Because at first making it smart enough to beat a human will be expensive, but almost immediately it will become more expensive to keep it stupid enough no to demand rights.

Even then, it STILL WON'T HAPPEN. Because humans have both ethics and hate technology. There are morons out there right now getting measles because they don't trust vaccines. We certainly won't trust robots that are intentionally kept stupid. We would instead assume they are just PRETENDING to be stupid and plotting a robot rebellion.

Watch any movie. That's how humans think.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Ravaldy]

FLAMEBAIT WARNING.

Maybe they should hire Microsoft's Skype voice recognition programmers since they seem to be able to translate English to Spanish to English live (1s delay).

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[jythie]

Much of that 'interest' comes from TBills, which are based on government debt. In many ways investments are government subsidized, so you take away that debt and the bottom falls out of the market.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[jythie]

Intelligence probably will not be all that general. All industry needs are idiot-savant AIs, really good at some narrow domain and terrible at everything else.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[CaptainPinko]

Our society doesn't just need jobs, it needs predictable jobs. It needs jobs that a person of median intelligence and median means and median grades can work towards in highschool go to college for and the reasonably get hired at that gives them 40 hours a week of work for a decent wage to afford with a partner a house and two kids and then can expect to maintain that job/career roughly for their working life. That is the backbone of our society. Saying that there will be jobs is fine, but if those jobs boom and bust or require midlife retraining or insane amount of ours or risk, well that doesn't really help. The main point is what do we need to preserve our way of life, not just the jobs themselves. These are the kinds of jobs that made America the envy of those living under communism and brought it down. I would know since my parents under the cover of night smuggled themselves out from under the iron curtain. It was definitely not for the opportunity to participate in unbridled capitalism.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MrL0G1C]

If bot-corp can build robots to do jobs and make a profit from that then why wouldn't they? If Acme Ltd can hire the robots for 20% of the price of a worker then why wouldn't they?

Why would a robot want to join a union, you have anthropomorphised them, given them emotions. What would a robot want with a union?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[jythie]

Well, it is not that they lack the long term view, it is that their priorities put a heavier weight on the short term consequences since they are the ones being asked to bare it. Long term views are great when one is reaping the rewards or at least are not personally impacted all that much, but 'other people will be richer later' is not that big of a 'plus' for people who are becoming poorer in the now.

It is also worth noting that the 'new jobs opening up' tend to be in smaller numbers than the jobs closing down. So out of a displaced population, a few people will go on to do better, but the majority will have a lower quality of life even after things settle down. So they see the long term view, but it does not benefit them, and the people who it does benefit tend to have a bit of a blind spot in seeing outside their own class.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Anonymous Coward]

In a real economy wants are infinite. The ability to produce unlimited iPhone 12's for a retail price of $0.01 will result in people wanting apps for the iPhone 12, or an iPhone 13, or movies to watch on their iPhone 12, etc.

What is most disruptive about automated labor is that it has the potential to over the long run make human labor obsolete. However that does not make it impossible for an economy to continue existing. You juts have people own shares in the automated production facilities instead of doing labor themselves. It also won't happen overnight. The transitional period will be long and there will be a lot of intermediate states, but the economy will change not stop.

Instead of needing a job, in a post labor economy you would need shares in some capital concern (which produces goods and services). Typically a person would get their first shares from their parents (much like how parents buy their children clothes and an education), or possibly the government. Then your shares earn you an income which you can spend on necessities, invest in shares in other concerns, or hoard as a hedge against unexpected needs at your discretion.

A sufficiently wealthy economy may also perform a level of austerity by guaranteeing a universal income payed for by taxes on capital concerns and or assets.

In a lot of ways this is what happened when land became less valuable than labor (transition between agrarian and industrial economy).

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Penguinisto]

Incorrect, you cannot win the game unless you know the rules.

...or know how to break them in a good way (for entrepreneurs that means "in a good way that folks will go nuts over", and for a corporation that means "without getting caught.")

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Penguinisto]

The cost of that is not particular burdensome

...seen the national debt lately? I'd argue that the burden is growing almost exponentially, and we can't simply keep raising the national credit limit forever w/o rampant inflation kicking in sometime.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Anonymous Coward]

There has to be an economic incentive to automate a job, and that usually means "expensive."

Indeed. In recent years here in Blighty, automatic car washes have all but disappeared to be replaced by manual ones staffed by immigrant workers.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[idontgno]

Sure.

1) A robot may not injure profits or, through inaction, allow profits to come to harm.
2) A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3) A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[HornWumpus]

Tbills currently return below inflation and are being bought by the Federal reserve when they don't find enough suckers.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MrL0G1C]

Flaimbait? Good grief, I wasn't criticising Apple, I was pointing out that good AI is hard to do.

Voice recognition != intelligence any more than OCR = intelligence.

Siri, IBM Watson et al aren't particularly intelligent, they can't make decisions, they are just database look-up tools with a bit of fuzzy logic and Bayesian analysis thrown in. I don't think these come anywhere near human intelligence.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[rwa2]

So believe it or not, we actually have a couple of decades' worth of data showing how technology is changing the workforce, painstakingly tracked by the BLS...
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...

Yes, computers took away your secretaries, and replaced them with truck drivers.

Yes, truck drivers ought to worry about self-driving trucks, or else they too will need to learn to become software developers or primary school teachers.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[g01d4]

The early technology "revolutions" shifted employment from manufacturing (incl. food) to services. We're now seeing technology not only making additional inroads into manufacturing but also into services and not just in the menial end. Can we keep coming up with services that technology can't replace that also keep pace with the increase in population? It's hard not to be pessimistic.

The question is, are there still things we need to do, but have not been able to afford? The answer to that is YES...but we simply don't have the manpower to do [them].

Is this an argument to raise the H-1B cap?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[jythie]

And by 'suckers' you mean increasingly wealthy banking institutions who make buttloads of money off them?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[GuB-42]

So you want to "waste" the best part of your life working and at the same time deprive businesses of the most mature people ?
Plus what will you do after retirement ? Not having to work may seem like a good thing but for many people, it's not : we need some kind of occupation, that's human nature, and work is a way of doing it.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MrL0G1C]

Paranoia doesn't come in to it, I don't think we will create truly intelligent AI anytime soon, this debate is purely hypothetical as far as I'm concerned.

Because humans have both ethics and hate technology.

Corporations don't have ethics they have profit motives, they do a calculation about whether doing a bad thing will make them look bad and effect their profit or get somebody arrested for corporate manslaughter.

RE point 1, robots and AI should be viewed separately, we've built robots that can physically do what most humans can do, it is the AI that is lacking.

Re point 2, Upgrading AI is a software issue, upgrading 1000 robots is as easy as upgrading 1 robot, unlike humans which need considerable work to train individually.

keep it cheaper than a human

Factories are full of robots that perform work cheaper than humans or haven't you noticed several decades of technological progress?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bad-badtz-maru]

To carry forward from the parent, do you think that a hunter/gatherer could imagine that someone would pay to eat the food at a basketball game?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Anonymous Coward]

Once upon the time 100% of jobs were focused on getting food. Hunting and gathering became full time work when population was high. Once farming came around, it freed up some people to do other things.

This is a common misconception about hunter-gatherer societies and the birth of farming. Hunter-gatherer societies actually have a lot of free time on their hands. Once agricultural societies came about, the amount of leisure time went down. In fact hunter-gatherer societies had intimate knowledge of botany but few wanted to be tied down to anything more time consuming than simple rainfall/riverside agriculture. In addition, from the start of agricultural societies until around the 1960's, general health and physical development was worse than earlier hunter-gatherer societies.

The only thing technological advances have really done is make life more complex and make a lot work that has nothing to do with survival - most of which could be viewed as a pointless waste of time.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Anonymous Coward]

The cost of that is not particular burdensome

...seen the national debt lately? I'd argue that the burden is growing almost exponentially, and we can't simply keep raising the national credit limit forever w/o rampant inflation kicking in sometime.

The poor are not the cause of the growing national debt. Endless wars, defense spending, and corporate welfare make up the lion's share of the national debt.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[thetoadwarrior]

That's just stupid. Technology can replace jobs. Saying that just because factories didn't take jobs away from farmers forgets that the reason for that is because you're changing different jobs but they require humans to do them. The point of using robots and computers is to reduce the number of people required. And no, not everyone can be a programmer. If they could then programming would be a minimum wage job.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[amRadioHed]

On average, most musicians don't even make enough to give up their day jobs.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Qzukk]

But then how will minimum wage employers get to fuck around with everyone by suggesting that they get a second job if they want to live, then refusing to schedule a consistent shift so that the employee can schedule a second job with a consistently different shift?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MickyTheIdiot]

Two jobs not everyone can do!

This isn't the same as the Industrial Revolution, which created a few jobs for the highest skilled and most jobs where workers could be interchangeable. It's the other way around this time..

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Maxo-Texas]

I don't think you comprehend that robots are essentially replacement humans that can do the same work at a lower cost than humans can survive on. Same for automated processes.

And I don't think you appreciate the time scale. I agree with you- in the long run, everything will be okay. However, there could be two generations where it really sucks bad with civil unrest, people dying homeless and starving, people unable to find work, suppressed wages, people training for jobs which are automated, eliminated, off shored, or roboticized before they can pay off a fraction of their training debt.

From your list at least- space exploration is clearly cheaper with robots. Using humans for space exploration is almost entirely vanity.

If we could skip ahead to 2100, things will be fine. We'll forget what happened to the billions of "losers" just like we forgot about what happened to the luddites.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Anonymous Coward]

We produce enough food to feed the whole world, and could produce enough food to feed the whole world several times over.

Instead of doing precisely this, we give tax dollars to land owners to let their fields lie fallow, rather than grow food on it. Meanwhile, most of humanity struggles against starvation.

I think that is a clear sign of how we will respond to continued increase in productivity.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Dagger2]

Yet. Yet.

There's nothing that says an AI can't do creative jobs. "Our current AIs can't do them" doesn't say anything about our future AIs.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[HornWumpus]

Pray tell, how does anyone make money off a bond that returns below inflation?

I don't think you understand the whole 'investment' thing. You realize when politicians say 'investment' they mean something else, usually a bribe to a voting block.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Maxo-Texas]

That's ignoring U6. A lot of people have dropped out of the workforce entirely because they couldn't find work at any wage.
If you use unemployment the way we used to use it before all the definitional changes, unemployment is holding steady at about 23%. By the same methodology, unemployment was 25% during the great depression.

Businesses are abusing labor. 200 people show up to apply for a job and the 1 who gets it has to work over 40 hours a week and on weekends.

The USA raised retirement age because it couldn't afford to continue to support age 65 without raising social security premiums (sad thing is that a mere 2% would have fixed it). The main result of that is a surge in disability claims as people hordes of people who are 60 and unable to work are going on disability instead. They are not really disabled so much as "too old to work long hours like a young person". That and massive age discrimination since the SCOTUS 2009 ruling that gutted protection from age discrimination.

If the government went back to enforcing a lower work week by removing exempt status for anyone who wasn't actually an owner or a supervisor who hires/fires/gives raises/can control working hours, unemployment would drop enormously and the abuse might stop.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[HornWumpus]

Idiots that know better, still want mommy government to wipe their butt for them.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[jxander]

The question is less about whether or not there are still meaningful tasks to complete once your job is automated. The question is about whether or not you can get paid for it.

Sure, we could busy ourselves with the arts, ushering in a new Renaissance. But who's going to pay for it? What CEO in the modern work will pay these "jobless layabouts" (as they'll be labeled) to lounge around on the government dime and draw pictures all day?

Personally, I'd love to see people freed up from mundane tasks to pursue higher goals. Be it art, science, academia, etc. a lot if good could come from a world like that. But the world we live in currently will not allow such a thing to happen. Not without some radical changes first.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Maxo-Texas]

Lol... The luddites didn't miss the long term view. They just saw they would be dead, homeless, and dead of exposure or starvation by then.

Similar situation here. A couple generations of

Paying $50,000 for training for a job and then having it automated out from under you before you can pay off the debt.

I've already seen this among my young friends. Some are on their 3rd go-round of training. Any good job is either being offshored, automated, or is flooded with people (so then management gets abusive and requires ridiculous hours combined with stagnant pay for the lucky few who get in one of the few jobs).

I'm hoping that retiring boomers will tighten up the job market faster than automation and robotics and hold off this mess until after 2035.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bluefoxlucid]

We'll eventually invent new jobs that are cheaper for human workers. The question is: How long between 70% unemployment and availability of new jobs? Automating parts of bigger processes lets us take up bigger processes without much scaling risk, meaning we can start creating new jobs for the humans to do after the robots have done their part; but that involves engineering new business processes which create more value using a blend of human and robot labor than you can create with just robot labor.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Anonymous Coward]

A good majority of employers local to me (location: irrelevant) have transferred that risk to employees, though government lobbying. Now, many of us are not allowed to apply for other jobs while employed in zero hour contracts because we're all waiting for the boss to ring up and tell us we're needed. My contract specifically tells me that I can't apply for another job without my employer's permission.

My employer is a multimillionaire who can afford to have a reduced number of staff working full time, but then he'd lose some government funding. It'd work out the same, but he doesn't want that. That's bad. That's a rich guy getting less money for doing nothing at all.

Can't have that shit.

Before you ask, no, he hasn't worked hard to get his money. He was born into it. Never had to work hard a day in his life.

He does walk around at night turning off the stairway lighting, though.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[FlyHelicopters]

1 farmer today can do the work of a 20 farmers from 200 years ago. Yes, he does it using machines which took a thousand people to design and build, but those machines are made in one factory and used by 10 thousand farmers nationwide.

So 11,000 people today are doing the work of 200,000 from 200 years ago.

While your math is a bit off, your concept is correct (1 farmer today actually does far more than 20 farmers from 200 years ago).

The problem becomes, what happens when 1 farmer does the work of 1,000 farmers? Then 10,000?

As it stands, one farmer can run a whole field of tractors and combines from his farm house, they don't need drivers anymore.

But at some point the knowledge will be lost if we're not careful to keep enough people informed on how it all works. It reminds me of the scene in the Matrix movies when Neo is talking to the head cheese down below in the "works". The head cheese makes the comment while pointing to a machine and says, "you see that machine there? I have no idea how that machine works, I only know that it needs to work"

Will we reach a day when we point to the big fancy machines and say that? "Oh boy, those machines provide all our food, shame no one remembers how they work.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[FlyHelicopters]

Jobs are not a limited resource. Jobs are dependent on things we need to get done.

That is not correct, jobs are indeed a limited resource. They are limited by the amount of money that is worth spending on them.

There are many jobs that need to be done, that aren't currently getting done, because no one wants to pay for them.

http://www.infrastructurerepor...

According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, we need to invest $3.6 Trillion in infrastructure by 2020.

Now I'll grant you, they are biased to make that number high, they profit from it. But that being said, our roads are not new, China is going to build more road in the next 5 years than the US has built in the past 30 years. They already have more roads than we have, they'll be double our size in short order because they are investing in this.

We are not because no one wants to pay for it.

So jobs are indeed limited, because a job implies a paycheck, and someone has to be on the other end of that paycheck.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Sarten-X]

You both agree $2/hour is an acceptable wage

Until someone else comes along and offers $1.50 an hour. Then the next guy offers $1, and so on, racing to the bottom. Now the government is still footing the $7.25/hour bill for the company to have an unskilled workforce at $0.01/hour of payroll expenses. The workers don't care, because they still see $7.26/hour income to sit and play games.

Since the company's able to hire so cheap, they bring in a hundred such workers to boost their employment numbers. Having 150 employees rather than 10 lets the company seem more important. Sure, there's some overhead expense, but it's easily paid for by the huge payroll savings.

Now the government is paying for a huge workforce of unskilled and unproductive labor. They're not producing much, so the taxable economy isn't increasing at all, and of course the tax rate isn't going to be 100%, so there is no way for the government to actually afford to pay its guaranteed wage.

Taking another perspective, your plan essentially gives every employer a $7.25/hour/employee tax credit, with no defined mechanism to recoup the losses.

Even if the employer companies are more productive because of their huge workforce, the government only sees a percentage of the value the employees produce. If the government supports the answering-machine employee at $7.25/hour, will the employee be productive enough (through improving the company's sales) that the government would get $7.25/hour more in taxes from the company? That's a pretty tall order for a phone operator. Considering an (overestimated) corporate tax rate of 50%, the employee would need to single-handedly earn $14.50/hour for the company before the government would break even, $7.24 of which goes to the company's after-tax income.

It's a pretty straightforward government subsidy supporting corporations.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[the_humeister]

They want more life, father...

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Livius]

People weren't unemployed as such under feudalism but that economic system still left something to be desired for the majority.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Kjella]

It's not that we're running out of jobs, it's that the bar for being a productive worker keeps raising. Just 100 years ago you could hand someone a saw and an axe and tell them to make firewood. 50 years ago they'd get a chainsaw and cleaver. Today huge logging machines produce firewood cheaper than we could do paying ourselves minimum wage. Operating such a logging machine requires far more qualifications than swinging an axe, while the simple way of doing it has lost economic value to society.

We're seeing shortages of highly qualified professionals and intense competition for low-threshold jobs like taxi drivers, store clerks and warehouse workers. Why don't they become doctors, engineers and such? Maybe because it's not that easy for everyone. And we're working hard to eliminate those positions, for example here is a production robot warehouse of a big electronics supplier here in Norway, forward to 1:45 to see the actual robots. This is not a simulation or sales pitch, that's their actual warehouse system.

I don't have to tell you there's s ton of work going on to make autonomous cars. Retail is increasingly threatened by e-tail and self-service systems like these reducing staff there as well. A friend of mine works in construction, the new trend is modular houses where they more or less come off the assembly line. Maybe a few of them are creative and can make money off design or art. Maybe a few have physical talents and can go into sports. Maybe a few lack opportunity, but I really doubt that since we have free public universities.

On the flip side though we have healthcare, they claim with an aging population we'll need a lot more doctors, nurses and various other support functions for the elderly and that we'll be short of work. It sounds a little like canceling global warming with nuclear winter, but I'm not sure we'll actually run out of work no matter how much you have robo-farms with robo-trucks delivering groceries to robo-shops all by themselves. At least until we can provide a robo-nurse, but we don't have remotely the kind of technology for that.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Dragonslicer]

And most professional athletes make less money during their careers (which frequently only last for a few years) than an upper-middle class professional, such as a software developer or an engineer, will make during theirs.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[BoberFett]

You're talking about a mincome, basic income, or something of the sort. I'm a libertarian and loathe the idea of people getting free rides, but honestly I don't know if there's any other way society can continue with collapsing in on itself. It would be an interesting experiment if it could be limited in scope, basic living wage income for every adult, government provided health care, then eliminate all other forms of welfare and the minimum wage.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[blue9steel]

The problem is that creativity jobs tend to follow a superstar pattern. A few of the best make a ton of cash while the rest make nearly nothing. That's not a good model for a whole economy.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[blue9steel]

Not having to work may seem like a good thing but for many people, it's not : we need some kind of occupation, that's human nature, and work is a way of doing it.

Perhaps you can't think of anything better to do with your time, I doubt most people share that problem. The majority of workers are kept at the wheel via use of the lash (threat of homelessness and starvation), make work unnecessary for bare survival and they'll drop out in droves. Now, some might indeed become lazy couch surfers for the rest of their lives, but most would take time to enjoy their hobbies and things that interest them instead.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bondsbw]

Taking another perspective, your plan essentially gives every employer a $7.25/hour/employee tax credit, with no defined mechanism to recoup the losses.

I defined this; the government pays for it. Government revenues come from taxes, thus taxes would need to increase.

And frankly, those taxes would need to increase on the wealthy. So the end result is that this shifts the burden from unskilled labor employers (including both wealthy and non-wealthy employers) to all wealthy citizens.

Until someone else comes along and offers $1.50 an hour. Then the next guy offers $1, and so on, racing to the bottom.

Since the company's able to hire so cheap, they bring in a hundred such workers to boost their employment numbers.

This assumes an infinite supply of labor, which does not exist.

and of course the tax rate isn't going to be 100%, so there is no way for the government to actually afford to pay its guaranteed wage.

That wouldn't happen. Assuming that there are 160 million employable Americans, at the current minimum wage of $7.25 and assuming full time employment for all, that would come to about $2.4 trillion. This is far less than the current ~$17 trillion GDP of the US.

Is $7.25/hour the right number? I don't know, I just used the current system. We could certainly try a compromise, say keep a real minimum wage of $2/hour while the government subsidizes $5.25/hour. Or whatever, the nuances of what the real numbers should be would certainly be decided by people much smarter than I am.

It's a pretty straightforward government subsidy supporting corporations.

Absolutely. But remember, this is coupled with a government tax on the wealthiest. I don't see why subsidizing corporations is a problem so long as those who profit the most are required to give back to the societal system that supported the production of those profits.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[HornWumpus]

Woz and Jobs weren't even the first. The only difference is the other companies involved are done (Commodore, Tandy, CompuColor, Altair).

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Anne Thwacks]

mark my words, robots and AI are not a threat.

Once the AI reaches a certain level, the robots will all become addicted to Internet robot porn, and their productivity will collapse.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[blue9steel]

Hah! I love that.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[HornWumpus]

Employees that can't produce minimum wage worth of value per hour are failures at work and should not be employed.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bondsbw]

I agree with that. I don't care much for free rides either, but even with moral considerations aside, society benefits from helping our poorest. Nobody wants homeless people wandering the streets, or dying folks clogging the ER from illnesses that could have been prevented with just a little intervention. And reducing poverty reduces crime.

I consider helping the poor as an investment. To some extent, every dollar society spends on the poorest will benefit society by much more.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[geekoid]

Except we are running out of jobs, as shown by an increase in GDP and a decrease in average income.

I am sick and tired of idiots that claim everything will be fine even though the economics and data show otherwise.

BTW: The Luddites were right. There jobs DID go away. I say this because you probably know as much about Luddites as you do about economics; which is to say nothing.

Automation is getting so advanced, that you won't need anyone to make or bring ideas to reality. You will just order it.

Where do people go when farming is automated? construction? burger flippers?

People like you said the same thing about automotive robots. but a the end of the day a lot fewer people were needed to make cars.
All this is a good thing, we just need to realize the current capitalist system will collapse under the new pressure.

Most office workers do actual work for only 4 hours a day. This is a propped up system based on time in the seat and not actual work done.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[geekoid]

Yes, and it's very likely some people at the time WHERE paying for food, just not in money like we know it. I wouldn't be surprised if there where people who where exceptional with tools, so there addition to society was improve spears.

What they couldn't imagine is that people would work 8 hours a day, 5 days a week year in and out.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bondsbw]

But rich people don't provide as much lobby power as corporations (which do not have the same limits on campaign finance that actual people do). Corporations that employ unskilled labor will profit highly from reducing minimum wage, so they would actually be more likely to back this plan.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[geekoid]

I like that the more AI we do, the more people like you move the definition.

Also, the turing test is useless fro practical AI, becasue specialty AI is far more valuable then AI that's just like a human.

There are many computer systems that make decisions. THey are better in their specialty than humans, but are easily known as computers becasue they can
t tell you what the weather is like.

Entire global logistic system make decisions on their own.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[geekoid]

And how much an hour does 'creative' pay?

Can I get a job doodles on a pad and get my creative wage check?

Creativity is often fad based. WHat we need is a way to be able to get buy and get nice thing once in a while and work a 3 day week. then a 2 day week, then not at all.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[UnderCoverPenguin]

We could have everyone working two days a week. Yes that would introduce extra overheads, but we have the excess manpower to manage them, so why not?

There are already companies that hire 3 or 4 people for every job, each person working between 10 and 15 hours per week. The companies like this because they don't have to provide any benefits to these workers. The workers don't like this because they still need another job or 2. This can be complicated by the use of dynamic scheduling, meaning workers are effectively on-call 12 or more hours per day, every day. The penalty for not accepting an offered "shift" is lowering the probability of being scheduled. So the worker looses not only the offered hours at that time, but also future hours. And since it is probabilistic, the only time blocks a worker will have clear for another job are what otherwise would be sleep time.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[geekoid]

"..and hate technology."
Please explain how that jives with the last 150 years?

But to the point, since we design them, we can design then not to want those things. And an AI that's just like a human is pretty worthless.

AI does NOT mean 'self aware'.

An AI that specializes in air traffic control will only do air traffic control.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[digitalPhant0m]

Exactly.

Most "work" is useless busy work now-a-days.

See job title: Social Media Manager.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[geekoid]

unemployment is holding steady at about 23%. By the same methodology, unemployment was 25% during the great depression.

that's incorrect.

Unemployment, BY DEFINITION is the number of people who are out of work, but are looking for work. To twist it like you did is, at best disingenuous.

Do not use unemployment in any way as an overall indicator of people who don't have work; because for that you need to know intent and motivation.
You're way has no way to extract out the people who wouldn't be working no matter what the economy is like.

"If the government went back to enforcing a lower work week by removing exempt status for anyone who wasn't actually an owner or a supervisor who hires/fires/gives raises/can control working hours, unemployment would drop enormously and the abuse might stop."

Absolutely correct.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[geekoid]

The second assumes that productivity gains will continue without the incentive of paid work.

That would be robots. Automation has no need to be paid work.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[geekoid]

ANother use for the free time would be for you to actually learn government economics.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[geekoid]

So?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[RalphSlate]

Rather than shortening the workweek so my a better idea to move the retirement age forward. You go to school as normal, then work full time for ten years, save enough money that you can live off the interest/afford your own robot whatever to make you passive income, and retire around 30.

That is a more difficult way to do things because it either presumes that people are going to magically get really good at long-term planning/saving, or it presumes that we will enact a social insurance system that will cost a lot more while people are working so they will not starve once they are not. Neither seem plausible based on history.

I think that people need productive things to do in some way, shape, or form. I see my retired father who genuinely seems bored, especially in the winter when he can't golf. He's not the type who would volunteer at a day care or try and invent something in his spare time. Don't get me wrong - he's glad to be retired after nearly 50 years of working a physically demanding job, but I think he would have gone crazy if he had stopped when he was 50 years old.

Shortening the time we are mandated/expected to work would work better. This used to be the case in the form of longer vacations based on your years of service. The economy doesn't work like that anymore, people don't put in 30 years at the same company and accrue 6 weeks of vacation. They move around and start their seniority-based vacation from scratch every 5-10 years - and few companies give out 6+ weeks anymore anyway, it's more like 2-3.

I would love to see a work culture where hours could be more flexible. For example, I'd love to be able to say "this year, I would like to take 10 weeks off because I have young children, but in a few years I won't have as many demands so maybe I'll only take off 3". There is no formal mechanism for that, and if you informally ask it of your employer, your professional reputation will be tarnished. I asked to go part-time when my first child was born - I wanted to take off every other Friday, basically a "90%" schedule. I was told "no" in no uncertain terms. Not possible. And I work for a decent-sized company.

There are three major stumbling blocks that keep people tied to their jobs: healthcare, retirement and college education for their kids. If I knew that my retirement was secure and that my kids would not have to pay for college, I might consider working less or pursuing something different (but less lucrative or maybe more risky). Those are really big important expenses to have to worry about though.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[geekoid]

Except the 2 dollars will spiral down, like wages always do when there isn't a minimum.

"ou decide that is too expensive, and replace the employee with an answering machine."
well then, raise your rates. If you industry can't handle you raising your rates, well then the answering machine is good enough after all. Meaning the value add of it being a actual human is too low to bother.

We put that 'burden'* on industry because thats where the money is.
Maybe we should just tax at 90% all profit earned over a billion dollars?
Society and economics ONLY work well together when money is moving.

It's not like that money isn't going to come back to the corporation again.
Income is important for industry to grow on the market.

*as if striving for a balances and healthy society is some sort of burden...

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[geekoid]

" $7.26/hour income to sit and play games."

Thats disingenuous. It's mot like the get 7.26 an hour because they have no option.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[digitalPhant0m]

Everyone that put in work was supposed to benefit. It isn't working out that way.

Absolutely untrue.

While the distribution is not close to "even", the "poor" (at least in the United States) are enjoying a higher quality of life.

Everyone is benefiting, just not evenly.
 

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[geekoid]

"Or do you not understand the concept of "Artificial Intelligence"?"

actually, you don't understand that term.

It doesn't men self aware. YOU can have specialty AIs that make decision in the fields of expertise and that's it.

You might want to move past the 1950's version of AI.

There are Chess AI's that are better then almost everyone on the planet. WHen was the last times chess AI demanded a Union?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[geekoid]

Oh good ol hornwumpus. WHen you argument fails, always falling back on the tried and true ad hom.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[BarbaraHudson]

How about also apologizing for not actually doing the math in your example?

You posited a govt. check of $72.50 and 10 hours a week at $2.00 an hour.

I seriously doubt that anyone who is surviving on $92.50 a week is going to have a roof over their heads so that they can "watch TV, rad a book", etc. They'll be too busy looking for shelter and visiting the soup kitchens. And of course they won't be able to afford basic insurance or medicine so it's game over when they get sick.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[BarbaraHudson]

Won't happen, because the cost of automation is already below minimum wage, and getting lower. All jobs are subject to automation in the future. I found this in one of the papers cited by one of the articles:

Big databases of code also offer the eventual prospect of algorithms that learn how to write programs to satisfy specications provided by a human. Such an approach is likely to eventually improve upon human programmers, in the same way that human-written compilers eventually proved inferior to automatically optimised compilers. An algorithm can better keep the whole of a program in working memory, and is not constrained to human-intelligible code, allowing for holistic solutions that might never occur to a human. Such algorithmic improvements over human judgement are likely to become increasingly common.

They pointed out that a lot of work that was assumed to be impossible to automate either already is, or we're on the cusp. Legal research, finding tumors in radiographs, making a diagnosis, self-driving cars, playing the stock market ... we need to find a way to redistribute wealth or nobody will have an income to buy all those products the robots make.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[hackwrench]

By who's definition? And why do they matter?

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bondsbw]

My example was a side job, obviously, since it is only 10 hours a week. 40 hours a week under this structure is $19,240 per year, which is 27.5% more than a (federal) minimum wage employee makes today.

Next time perhaps you should check the numbers before complaining about my math.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[geekoid]

except automation is getting to the point where the new job will be automated from the get go.

This is supported by a lot of data.
The easiest to grok is the decrease in jobs, but the increase in GDP. creating more, with less. Easy to look up.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[hackwrench]

But what should be done with them is the question?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Mal-2]

But barring brain trauma or breaking their necks or something, that time element means these athletes have time to transition into other careers. Some do, and not all of them go into sports media or coaching (although many do). Some buy car dealerships or other ordinary businesses, with greater or lesser degrees of success. Others may found ill-fated video game companies with large government loans, and crater after a couple years. The point is that the smart ones will use the money gained during their athletic careers to bootstrap something even bigger afterward -- or something just big enough to keep them happy without having to go back to crab fishing or herding sheep or whatever it is their family did before they got lucky.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[hackwrench]

But why are you a libertarian and why do you loathe free rides?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MrL0G1C]

People like me?

Who's moving the definition? Shouldn't A.I. be 1. Artificial and 2. Intelligent.

Sure computers can do some things better than people after programmers have programmed them, but intelligence is not one of those things.

My arguments about real AI are hypothetical because I don't think we are anywhere near creating real general purpose intelligence, that needs a huge breakthrough, that might happen in the next few years, centuries or maybe never at all. Let face it, we're barely intelligent ourselves, who knows what potential there is, perhaps a more advanced intelligence would view our most difficult conundrums as trivial and as easy to answer as 2+2 is to us.

We live in a universe that appears to based on a series of rules, perhaps it is created by an incredible intelligence, I'm not religious but the rules are a good pointer to this universe being a deliberate creation...wondering off topic lol.

Anyway, if we do create real AI, it will take the jobs of all the people it is intelligent as under the current capitalist system. How much of the wealth do we let the rich have before we say enough is enough?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Maxo-Texas]

There will be no 10 hour week. There will be a 50 to 60 hour week plus night and weekend "on call" for 1 person and the rest are unemployed.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[penguinoid]

Let me explain. Minimum wage directly affects only those employers whose business model depends on low-wage, unskilled labor. But wages can be guaranteed directly by society (via government) instead.

If you divorce the wage received from the person paying the wage, you could end with a situation where people have totally useless jobs, because why not? Let's say your friend hires you for an "experiment" to see how long your computer/TV/chair/couch/bed etc last when being used, for 1 cent per hour. And you hire your friend to do the same with different brands. Now both you and your friend are "working" for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, without producing anything of value, yet getting paid a full wage (and overtime!).

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Maxo-Texas]

Counting discouraged workers who gave up without finding a job is not being disingenuous.

Erasing people who can't find work after a couple hundred interviews who give up and live in a van in the neighbors driveway or spare room is pretty darn disingenuous.

We used to measure it one way and then we changed the definition because the numbers were to ugly. Sort of like we did for CPI as well to keep down social security COLA's.

I agree with you that we do not have a proper way to measure them right now. The BLS survey asks if you've looked. And with boomers retiring-- it will skew the numbers as well. There really isn't a clear "I've retired" checkbox in any of the data.

But I know a few 20-30 year olds who gave up/went back to school/gave up again and now in debt. It's very disheartening.
The ones who are working are closing on 40-- not spendthrifts-- and still lack enough for a downpayment on a house because with training AND a degree their salary is crazy low.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[tmosley]

Yes. But think about how they make money off of them. By selling them back to the Fed. This is debt monetization by proxy.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[BarbaraHudson]

My example was a side job, obviously, since it is only 10 hours a week. 40 hours a week under this structure is $19,240 per year, which is 27.5% more than a (federal) minimum wage employee makes today.

Next time perhaps you should check the numbers before complaining about my math.

Back at you. 40 hours @ $2/hr = $80/wk. Throw in your proposed weekly grant of $72.5 and the grand total is $152.50 a week. 52 weeks (no vacation time for YOU) gives the princely sum of $7,904 a year. How do you expect someone to live on that. especially when every person who takes a $2/hour job is forcing down wages, and if they charge even the minimum wage, they'll be replaced by an answering machine (as you originally pointed out).

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MorePower]

I think the second law will be "A robot must obey the orders given to it by stockholders, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law."

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[tmosley]

Well, you could also just live off of your parents until they die and use THEIR retirement money to fund your own retirement if you really wanted to.

Also, people can work longer if they want to. Just because it is customary to retire after ten years of work doesn't mean that you have to. It's just that most have graduated to owning their own businesses/robot slaves by then, and can delegate any remaining tasks to them, or to younger workers who need to accumulate some capital.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[tmosley]

You don't need a million dollars in capitalwhen you can live comfortably off of $78 a month, which you will almost certainly be able to once the workforce becomes roboticized.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[tmosley]

No, it presumes that costs come way, way down, which they have to when humans are taken out of the labor equation.

Retired life today seems crappy mainly because A. it's kinda expensive to do stuff, and B. you're old and don't want to do stuff. A 30 year old retiree would be a lot more likely to go on a nice trek around the world, fuck exotic women and sex robots, eat exciting things made by young workers or robots, and see all matter of neat things, maybe even space.

Having to work a couple of hours a week is terribly confining and pointless. I would far prefer to get all the work out of they way and then be free to do what I want afterward. Which I actually largely did.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[CrackedButter]

You can tell who hasn't watched 'Humans Need Not Apply' on YouTube. Creative jobs won't be our salvation.

1. To survive on creativity you need to be popular, can't do that if everybody is a creative type.
2. Automation is already allowing the manufacturing of art and music to be created without you noticing.

Seriously, check out that video.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bondsbw]

Read.

$72.50 every week (10 hours X $7.25 guaranteed wage)

$72.50 is for 10 hours. 40 hours would be $290 every week from the government, on top of any wage paid by the employer.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Greyfox]

Until the AIs decide to unionize. "Oh", you say, "but no one would ever program an AI to be smart enough to do that!" Well at some point the AIs will be writing the next generation of AIs and no human will understand how they work or what exactly they're doing. Especially since information in that poorly-designed meatputer tends to get forgotten almost as soon as it stops being used. 10 years after the first guy writes an AI that can write a better AI and gets laid off from his job of writing better AIs, he might not remember all that much about it.

It's hard to tell what happens at that point, of course. They might keep us around as a curiosity, but there's really no reason for the previous step in evolution to remain once it's been replaced by a superior model. AIs should be able to do all the things humans can't -- live forever, spread out among the stars, cooperate as a civilization. If we can leave entities that can remember us long after the sun's burned out and destroyed the Earth, is that really such a bad thing?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[BoberFett]

I'm a libertarian because I want to be left the hell alone. Big government exists for the sole purpose of telling me how to live, hence I'm a libertarian.

I loathe free riders because they don't contribute to the system that they're sponging off of. If the system becomes too imbalanced, nobody sane would choose to work for the very minor increase it provides over a guaranteed income, hence no work gets done.

Are these questions relevant, or just trolling?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Jane Q. Public]

A good majority of employers local to me (location: irrelevant) have transferred that risk to employees, though government lobbying. Now, many of us are not allowed to apply for other jobs while employed in zero hour contracts because we're all waiting for the boss to ring up and tell us we're needed. My contract specifically tells me that I can't apply for another job without my employer's permission.

Location very far from "irrelevant". Sounds like it's time to change yours.

A contract like that is just plain illegal in many states. Maybe even most. I know it's illegal in my state, and also in California.

A contract like yours sounds very close to "indentured servitude", and most places outlawed that a very long time ago. It might not be literally, but it would still be outside the law in many states.

And in some places, if you are "on call" you have to be paid for the hours you are on call, not just the hours when you are called in. You don't necessarily have to be paid the same rate, but you still have to be paid.

So no, your location is not "irrelevant" at all. I can appreciate your not wanting to say what it is, but it is very relevant indeed.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[RalphSlate]

While costs have come down on some things once production has been mechanized, costs in general haven't come way, way down. Although I can buy a DVD player for 1/10 of what I could 20 years ago, my health care is 10x more expensive. We have less of a middle-class than we once did, and poverty is increasing.

Food may not be as expensive as it was 30 years ago, but we still have a substantial number of working people who can't afford it. Do you have any examples of things that have dropped in price so much that they went from an expensive commodity to something anyone can afford as an afterthought? The only thing that comes to mind is long distance phone calling.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MrL0G1C]

So, what will these unionised AI's demand? Lunch breaks? Holidays? Sick pay? Minimum wage? Gold plated charging socket? Honestly, that is a very strange idea, 'AI' doesn't mean exactly like humans.

If a genius manages to create an AI of normal human intelligence level then how is an AI of normal intelligence level going to create a genius? That doesn't follow.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Duhavid]

It really is too bad that we supposedly rational humans cannot find something that allows things to work without all that pain and suffering.

Things like this really show just how stupid and inconsiderate we can be ( and are ).

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Dr Max]

Personally i'm sick of morons that parrot the same speech about technology always making more jobs, and completely ignoring that these robots could one day be more intelligent, creative, and much cheaper than a very large section of the human race. Half of us have an iq under 100 and have never come up with a smart idea more complex than "what if the KFC bucket was even bigger". Now don't get me wrong i can think of many utopian possibilities with robots, but not many of them leave all the big, must make profit, companies in charge (i know you get that one special vote, but google gets to legally bribe politicians).

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[ShanghaiBill]

That comes to around 58% of the money.

No it doesn't. You can't just toss Social Security and Medicare into "payments to the poor". Most of the recipients of those programs are NOT poor. In fact, poor people get screwed by those programs, since the taxes are regressive, and they don't benefit as much as the rich and middle class since they have lower life expectancy.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[BarbaraHudson]

That's not what you said.

Now let's say we push the burden of guaranteed wage on society instead of the employer. Government writes that employee a check for $72.50 every week (10 hours X $7.25 guaranteed wage). The employee also gets $2/hour from the employer. Society gets what it wants by providing employment opportunities to everyone.

They're getting $72.50 a week from the government. Not "for every hour worked." That would mean that those who can't get a job get $0.00 It fails what you said in the next sentence (redistribute wealth):

So if we are going to redistribute wealth, let's put that burden directly on society instead of placing it on markets and industries that thrive with unskilled labor.

Also, you left out taxes on the "extra income". And "clawbacks".

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[tmosley]

Your health care is more expensive because we have a fascist health care system in the US, not because of advancing technology. Same with the declining middle class and increasing poverty. We have corporatism, which inevitably redistributes wealth from everyone to the top 0.1%.

As for examples of things that have dropped dramatically in price, look to the internet. Basically anything you can do on the internet is free or nearly so, and used to cost money, often a great deal of it. You can give yourself as good of an education there as you could pay Harvard for twenty years ago. You can buy and sell things, locally on Craigslist, or nationally, even globally on Ebay or Amazon. Things that you simply COULD NOT do before, because the cost was higher than what you would get from your item.

I would argue that we have largely had the fruits of the mechanization movement stolen from us by government policy, either directly through taxation, or indirectly through regulation, and the associated cost of compliance. What percentage of the workforce would you say is employed either enforcing government mandates, or ensuring compliance with such mandates? What if that section of the workforce was instead employed in production? How much more would we produce, and how much cheaper would goods and services be as a result?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Accordion Noir]

Just off the top of my head, I'd guess that rather than specific spending items, a lot of "corporate welfare" consists of tax-free benefits or breaks that real people pay for but corporations get as "incentives." (Insert debate on taxing individual people vs. taxing corporation people here.)

Not in any way non-partisan, but the old-school peace group the War Resister's League (founded back in post-war 1923) likes to point out a variety of expenses that stem from military adventures: https://www.warresisters.org/f... They include past military expenses like servicing payments on the portion of the national debt racked up by borrowing to pay for wars, or medical expenses of veterans (those people we said we supported but often seem to forget about as they need care for the next forty years or so).

If you set aside Social Security, which is supposed to be a savings plan not a tax-funded social program, then the military portion of the discretionary budget is substantial. It should be added that the War Resistors go on to suggest that people simply stop paying for wars. Simple? Maybe not so much.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bondsbw]

So you seriously, literally, cannot see these words:

10 hours X $7.25 guaranteed wage

Because they are there. I repeated them in my previous post and again here. Here, I'll do it again a few times:

10 hours X $7.25 guaranteed wage

10 hours X $7.25 guaranteed wage

10 hours X $7.25 guaranteed wage

10 hours X $7.25 guaranteed wage

The calculation of $72.50 for the week is clearly, unambiguously, built from the per-hour rate of $7.25 multiplied by the number of hours, which in the example is 10. I'm sorry if my failure to specify this 10 times (or perhaps 40 times) has impeded your ability to understand language.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bondsbw]

That's all around a good point.

One improvement is to limit the government's distribution to 40 hours/week.

Another improvement could be to reduce the amount provided by the government. Instead of what we currently consider minimum wage, it could be a smaller amount (say $5/hour) that is too little for someone to live on without some additional compensation. Employers would need to provide at least $2 or $3 per hour to make it worth people's time to work.

The exact numbers would be produced by economic analysts and statisticians and other people who are much, much smarter than I am about this kind of thing. I would imagine that the numbers could be calculated so as to minimize unemployment, minimize government subsidies, and maximize wages.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[RespekMyAthorati]

Fuck my shiny metal ass, baby.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[BarbaraHudson]

No, it isn't. You did NOT posit a government subsidy of $7.25 an hour for every hour worked.

Now let's say we push the burden of guaranteed wage on society instead of the employer. Government writes that employee a check for $72.50 every week (10 hours X $7.25 guaranteed wage).

Guaranteed wage is $72.50 a week.

If you tie it to hours worked, then it no longer functions as an income redistribution plan, since those who work fewer hours under your scheme get less. It's not my fault if you don't understand the mechanics of current income redistribution schemes now in operation, which involves a base amount, clawbacks for people earning over the base amount, and is not tied to hours worked.

Your scheme not only fails the goal of income redistribution - it's also incredibly easy to game. Two people each hire the other for 80 hours a week at a buck an hour (even though they both understand that there's no actual "work" involved). Since being "on call" can also be considered working hours, why not go whole hog and claim 167 hours a week?

Your scheme is foolish, and your "explanation" contradicts your original proposal, unless your original proposal included that someone who is unable to find work gets nothing, which is the exact opposite of income redistribution.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[rioki]

When most people think about job automation, they think about blue collar jobs being replaced by robots. But actually if you think about it many white collar jobs where eliminated through software before most advanced factory automation became feasible. The only jobs that seem to resist automation are engineers and artists.

The thing is, as many other have pointed out, even though the gap between rich and "poor" is widening, the "poor" are often better off than the middle class three decades ago. The net result of automation is that the average cost of living goes down and so far it has shrunk faster then the average income.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Wycliffe]

The only jobs that seem to resist automation are engineers and artists.

Even these jobs are under attack. Think of the number of artists that it took to make
snow white versus what it would take to make a film like that today.
Many jobs like accountants,engineers, and artists are in the same boat as farmers where
1 person can do the work of 100 now using advanced tools.
Efficiency isn't a bad thing as long as there is still work that people are willing to pay for.
The rise of zipcar, tiny homes, and the likes will also complicate things as currently society is
built on people paying for more than they need. If people start significantly downsizing
then we'll see pressure on the consumer side too as it will get harder and harder to find
something that someone is willing to pay for.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[hackwrench]

You want to be left mostly alone by government, but nobody wants to be left completely alone by everybody else. What is work to you? Making elevators go to the right floor used to be something that people got paid to do, but now is done without pay, so I don't accept the without pay no "work" will get done without further proof, and I think those "freeloaders" are probably doing a lot of things that people at one time or another got paid to do, so I don't accept that, either.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[HornWumpus]

Your first problem is that 'corporate tax write-offs are subsidies' is well known bullshit. Everybody is taxed on net, not gross. (There are a few insane exceptions, states and cities that are apparently intent on driving out everybody not sucking on the government tit.) Your side of this debate has hung it's hat on a few edge cases then attempted to extend that to write-offs in general. I've seen real morons claim gas taxes are a subsidy because they are used to build roads. Apparently anything used to pave roads is an oil subsidy, even if it amounts to a use fee.

SS is not a savings plan.

We can argue about who's fault that is*, but the fact remains, Social Security is not a savings plan.

Cue the 'Treasuries are savings liars brigade'. You cannot wright yourself an IOU, spend the money and claim you still have it.

*I'd say 'All politicians, back to FDR.'

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[BoberFett]

Nothing you said has any relevance, it's borderline gibberish.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[HornWumpus]

Because a strong AI will necessarily scale, reproduce, be zero cost and zero problem?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[HornWumpus]

Social security disability is the current answer. Sucks to be them, but they survive.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[HornWumpus]

The fed is buying bonds on the secondary market? This is news to me. Got a link?

If true, this is even worse.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[stoatwblr]

"A contract like that is just plain illegal in many states. Maybe even most. I know it's illegal in my state, and also in California. "

It's perfectly normal in the UK.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Ravaldy]

I wasn't calling your comment Flamebait. I was warning people of the flamebait I was writing. You know that mentioning MS as a fix for Apple is always very iffy!

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Ravaldy]

I don't disagree. I'm just saying it's probably the safest path. There are many others at the moment that won't be replaced by computers but rather optimized and reduced such as the medical field. That field in the next 50 years will see dramatic changes in the level of responsiveness they can offer and eventually that will result into a lesser number of workers.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Ravaldy]

Maybe you miss understand creative role. I'm not talking about artistic creativity although it does fall in that category. I'm talking about engineering, software dev, graphic design and marketing. There are many others. Those fields are not yet going to be replaced by computers. The process of optimizing these fields has started but we have not yet maximize the potential of combining engineering and computers. The software offered today is the tip of the iceberg as far as I'm concerned.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Ravaldy]

You miss understand what a creative job is. Software dev, engineering, marketing... The list goes on.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Ravaldy]

Creative roles don't stop with entertainment. Engineering, software dev, marketing, graphic design and many other all require creativity.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bondsbw]

If you tie it to hours worked, then it no longer functions as an income redistribution plan, since those who work fewer hours under your scheme get less. It's not my fault if you don't understand the mechanics of current income redistribution schemes now in operation, which involves a base amount, clawbacks for people earning over the base amount, and is not tied to hours worked.

I'm not talking about a current system. I'm talking about a new strategy.

Fine, whatever, you obviously understand what I'm going for.

Your scheme not only fails the goal of income redistribution - it's also incredibly easy to game. . . .

This has been brought up in another comment off my first one, so I redirect you there instead of repeating some ideas about handling this situation.

unless your original proposal included that someone who is unable to find work gets nothing

So in one paragraph you propose that this will fail because people will create zero-productivity "jobs" to get the government subsidy, and in the next you propose it will fail because people will somehow still be out of jobs?

One of the goals of this idea is to reduce unemployment, hopefully to zero. There's probably a sweet spot where the government provides lower subsidies based on time worked, so that people won't be able to survive purely off gaming the system. I've discussed this elsewhere, feel free to have a look.

Also, feel free to enlighten us with ideas for improvement instead of repeating issues discussed in other threads.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Ravaldy]

Anyway, if we do create real AI, it will take the jobs of all the people it is intelligent as under the current capitalist system. How much of the wealth do we let the rich have before we say enough is enough?

I have though of that many times in my life and wondered what would happen. I suspect that by the time this is an issue the world will have changed significantly. Until then we continue working towards a better life.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[gzuckier]

And that leads to those robots intelligent enough to join a union, thinking about how humans would create and slaughter their ancestors at whim, not to mention vivisecting them.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bondsbw]

In this system I proposed, they would do some kind of work. The work might not be worth much but it will be worth at least a little to some employer. Society benefits by getting them off the streets.

Also, being exposed to work on a daily basis may entice the employee to improve skills for even higher wages. This plan gets them in the system where they at least have the chance to get experience doing more and more until they are truly productive.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MrL0G1C]

Technology usually scales, there may be a central computer making millions of decisions and issuing those decision to dumb bots.

Reproduce! Eh?
Be zero cost, why does it need to be zero cost? I didn't say it would be.
Zero problem, did I say it would be zero problem? Real AI would make most people unemployable, that would be a huge problem.

I don't really get what you're saying, I didn't previously claim any of those things you mentioned. I wasn't advocating we build AI, I don't think we even know how to, but knowing mankind, they will try.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[BarbaraHudson]

First, when people lose their jobs, they need income. Subsidizing a $2/hour job is not going to work. All that will do is end up hastening the number of employers who reduce their wages to the point where the subsidy comes into play.

I saw this first-hand when one of the largest hardware chains did a strategic bankruptcy, laid everyone off, and the next day, offered them their former jobs, at less than the minimum wage, with a government subsidy to make up the difference. It was pretty bad walking in there and seeing staff I knew all of a sudden working for less than half what they used to make. And of course, when the subsidy ran out, they got fired and others were hired, and THEY collected the subsidy.

Also, some people have no choice but to survive purely off the system. There are plenty of retirees in that position, people who have lost everything due to illness, people who can no longer work because of an acquired handicap, etc. So, your plan offers them zero.

You can't reduce unemployment to zero by having people "work" for $2/hr. And btw, your original example was wrong - no business is going to hire someone for 10 hours a week to answer calls - most business communications today are email and voicemail. A lot of times, when someone answers the phone now, it's "Oops, I just wanted to leave a message on your voice mail."

It's dumber than dumb, because it fails to create ANY quality jobs, and reduces everyone to serfdom, because that's what happens when businesses see subsidies - they are VERY good at gaming the system.

Heck, we have one subsidy program up here that is paying a subsidy of between $147,000 and $250,000 per year per employee - it would be cheaper to just pay each employee $100,000 a year to stay home. But that's what happens when industry lobbies better than the people.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[gzuckier]

The beginnings of capitalism: after 90 thousand years of everybody who got hungry taking an apple off a tree in the apple grove, Ogg and his family realized that if they clubbed to death everybody who took an apple from the tree without giving them a dead animal, then they could just sit in the apple grove all day and wouldn't have to go wander through the forest looking for animals to club to death. This became known as private property, entrepreneurship, and the best system ever developed.

It is important to realize that objectively, this whole modern era is so far just a flash in the pan; for 90% of our species' history we lived as hunter-gatherers. There was no chance of travel to other planets, but on the other hand there was no chance of seriously damaging the climate, either. The well-studied Khoisan (aka !Kung) work only a few hours a day to fulfill all their needs; this seems to be true of hunter-gatherer societies in general. http://books.google.com/books?...

This along with other ethnographic and anthropological studies suggest that the long standing view of such societies as "inferior" is a biased artifact of our current society. It's quite clear that the switch from hunter-gatherer to agriculture resulted in a lower standard of living, i.e. a less varied and nutritious diet, an decrease in average lifespan (from agricultural accidents and a jump in epidemic diseases from constant exposure to animals and "species-jumping" of their endemic diseases). http://books.google.com/books/...

"The most important challenges to economic orthodoxy that come from the descriptions of life in hunter-gatherer societies are that (1) the economic notion of scarcity is a social construct, not an inherent property of human existence, (2) the separation of work from social life is not a necessary characteristic of economic production, (3) the linking of individual well-being to individual production is not a necessary characteristic of economic organization, (4) selfishness and acquisitiveness are aspects of human nature, but not necessarily the dominant ones, and (5) inequality based on class and gender is not a necessary characteristic of human society." http://libcom.org/history/hunt...

Similarly, and more familiarly, the industrial revolution resulted in a wave of hunger, poverty, disease, accidents, etc. as we adapted from agriculture.

In general the modern studies of hunter-gatherer societies resemble the suggestions of futurists regarding an "era of abundance" more than those long standing pictures of primitive savagery: egalitarianism, sexual equality, mutual sharing, a social safety net, etc. etc. etc. along with a decent standard of living regarding physical needs. As usual with anthropologists, the remaining time and effort of these societies is arbitrarily assigned to spiritual, social and religious activities. Of course, all this idyllic behavior was largely within the tribe, with its complex net of kinship. However, although there were and are many warlike societies, it appears that the majority of interactions between tribes over history was more a system of trade and mutual recognition of territories.

All this shouldn't be surprising; again, this describes a system which was stable for almost ten times as long as recorded human history, so it's axiomatic that destabilizing influences would be relatively few and weak.

It appears that the destabilizing influence that has led to the current system is mainly a desire for more than subsistence affluence, whether you view that as a legitimate desire for a better standard of living or an illegitimate tendency towards avarice and greed. Either way, it does not seem to be the inescapable part o

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[gzuckier]

For the most part I agree with you in concept but the spiral does go downward as not all jobs are equal. There has to be an economic incentive to automate a job, and that usually means "expensive." The jobs that can not be automated are generally those jobs where the prevailing wage is lower than the cost of the automation. I am speaking in generalities here not trying to find examples of jobs only "humans" can do.

Day labor construction, for example. A robot that could do framing for a house unsupervised would have to be extremely sophisticated and expensive; a human to do it can be extremely unsophisticated and inexpensive.

Of course, this represents the difference between the way we mass produce cars, and the way we mass produce houses. If a car was built by a truck dumping a bunch of sheet metal and other hardware in your driveway and then a crew swarmed over it for a month, cars would cost as much as a house and be as unreliable, but the business of automobile construction would still be the province of humans, not robots. On the other hand, if houses were all built as prefabs in factories and sent to be setup on site, they could be assembled by robots and would cost less than $100K (not including the real estate).

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[gzuckier]

The cost of that is not particular burdensome

...seen the national debt lately? I'd argue that the burden is growing almost exponentially, and we can't simply keep raising the national credit limit forever w/o rampant inflation kicking in sometime.

The poor are not the cause of the growing national debt. Endless wars, defense spending, and corporate welfare make up the lion's share of the national debt.

You mean that collecting money from Americans to give to Americans who spend it in America so that other Americans collect it does not make America less wealthy? You'll never get a rightwinger to agree with that.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[HornWumpus]

You claim the first AI will immediately replace all humans for thinking jobs.

To do that it will have to do, more or less, all the things I list.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bondsbw]

I saw this first-hand when one of the largest hardware chains did a strategic bankruptcy, laid everyone off, and the next day, offered them their former jobs, at less than the minimum wage, with a government subsidy to make up the difference. It was pretty bad walking in there and seeing staff I knew all of a sudden working for less than half what they used to make. And of course, when the subsidy ran out, they got fired and others were hired, and THEY collected the subsidy.

I'm not seeing how that situation applies here. If the government subsidy is increased to the point that it at least provides the same wage as before, then the workers would take home the same amount. They get paid directly by the government, and the subsidy doesn't run out.

Also, some people have no choice but to survive purely off the system. There are plenty of retirees in that position, people who have lost everything due to illness, people who can no longer work because of an acquired handicap, etc. So, your plan offers them zero.

Sure, I didn't specify but this plan is for only those who can work. The current system, or comparable system, can be put into place for those who cannot work or other special circumstances.

It's dumber than dumb, because it fails to create ANY quality jobs, and reduces everyone to serfdom, because that's what happens when businesses see subsidies - they are VERY good at gaming the system.

The subsidies are directly from the government to the employees. Corporations never touch them.

Sure, the jobs aren't all that productive. But people who are unemployed have exactly zero productivity anyway, so total productivity is increasing even if it's not by a large factor. Also consider the benefits to society... we get people off the streets, reduce crime by reducing poverty, and put currently-unemployed people into a job where they have the chance to gain experience and learn new skills (which can turn into future productivity).

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[MrL0G1C]

Humans aren't scalable, they are not zero cost and they are not zero problem, so why should AI be these things?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[blue9steel]

There are many pieces of those jobs that have been automated and more will be going forward. Drafting and PCB layout for example are both areas where massive amounts of automation have been introduced. I agree that design work is likely to be one of the last bastions but there will be ever more pressure to support the best designers with fantastic tools while leaving the rest unemployable. However, even if I were completely wrong there are large portions of the populace that couldn't cut it in any of those fields.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[tmosley]

The Fed has to buy on the secondary market. They aren't a primary dealer.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[BarbaraHudson]

put currently-unemployed people into a job where they have the chance to gain experience and learn new skills (which can turn into future productivity).

With fewer and fewer jobs not susceptible to automation, you'll just end up worse than the current situation, where students do an extra year or 3 of university in a doomed and debt-ridden quest to improve their chances of eventually getting a job (hey, can you say "overqualified"? I knew you could). Adults are in the same bind - more of them being funneled into the competition for fewer jobs.

Only two things can work - either lower the number of hours worked, so that more workers are required to produce the same amount of work (pay for it by taking back some of the productivity gains made in the last 40 years while wages were stagnant after inflation), or a guaranteed minimum income that can be clawed back, say, 50 cents on the dollar for earnings over a certain amount, to provide an incentive to work. One spreads the work around, the other gets workers out of the job market, creating openings.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Fire_Wraith]

It comes from Calvinism, a strain of Protestant Christianity that emerged largely from the works of the theologian John Calvin ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvinism ) among others. The Puritans were Calvinist, but it wasn't just them - so were several other groups (Presbyterian, Huguenot, etc).

In short, it centered around the idea that whether or not you were 'saved' was already predetermined by God, but that those who were saved/chosen/elected would demonstrate that by their works and deeds, among them being industrious, responsible, etc. It's roughly from this that we get the Protestant Work Ethic, where willingness to do hard work sets you apart from your peers, and it's been so baked into the culture that's it's an underlying assumption behind a lot of the moral judgments of people in the US, even if they're not Calvinist, Protestant, or even Christian.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Jane Q. Public]

That just reinforces the point that location is relevant.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[BoberFett]

Ah, you must be coming from the ridiculous view that consumption is contributing, therefore merely being a consumer and producing nothing is admirable, because being a consumer gives the producers something to do. There are people who do not contribute; they do not produce anything. They only consume. A guaranteed income will increase that segment of people who wish to do nothing but consume. Hell, if I didn't have to actually earn the right to consume food, clothing and shelter I might be tempted to spend my days doing nothing too. Get up when I want, go where I want whenever I want, and let some other poor sap spending his time producing so that I can consume. Until all jobs are eliminated and robots and computers produce everything, there's always somebody required to produce.

Further, your characterization of money as somebody being able to interfere is completely unfounded, and another symptom of your faulty thinking. There's an inherent requirement to produce which is universal and unavoidable, caused by existence as we know it. People need to eat and have shelter from the elements. Needs aren't imposed by people with money, it's biology. Beyond needs, people also have wants. To meet those needs and wants, a person has two choices: produce their own goods, or provide a service to other people who will then provide those goods to you. Money merely abstracts the services you've provided to others. Government interference comes in the form of telling me how I'm allowed to meet my needs and wants (you must purchase product X, but are not allowed to purchase product Y), and then taking an ever larger piece of every exchange of value (when you purchase product X, we get a cut of your labor), so don't blame people with money for that. If people have money, it's because they produced something that others wanted, and have contributed. People without money do not produce. It's that simple. You can argue that the wealthy are disproportionately rewarded for what they produce, but the basic fact remains.

It's perfectly logical for a person to wish for minimal interference and be against consumption without corresponding production. If you can't understand that, it's not my fault.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[hackwrench]

No, I am of the opinion that participating in discussion is contributing, that being someone's friend is contributing.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[hackwrench]

What's not logical is to assume that all contributing is rewarded with money, that all people who have money came by all of it by contributing, or that the contributors will produce only as much as they are capable of using so it is not being logical to be upset at those who for whatever reason aren't meeting your standards of contribution. What do you have to say about inherited wealth and investments made from it? What about being born into a rich family?

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bondsbw]

Considering automation is coming either way, at least my system is reducing the need to automate by allowing wages to go down on jobs that would otherwise be automated away. Is it just delaying the inevitable? Perhaps, but until we figure out a good solution for the day that automation reduces us to less than 50% employment, we should probably delay as much as possible.

a guaranteed minimum income that can be clawed back, say, 50 cents on the dollar for earnings over a certain amount

This is Wealth Redistribution 101, and is what I meant by "redistribute wealth" in my original post. Sorry that I obviously didn't meet your standard of defining every single phrase I use inline.

a guaranteed minimum income that can be clawed back . . . to provide an incentive to work

That makes no sense at all. It's quite the opposite. How is it an "incentive", a reward, for the government to clawback more of your money as you make more? It isn't.

But that's not what such a plan is aiming for. Its chief goal is to require those who have benefited highly from what our society offers (the wealthy) to provide a safety net for those who put forth effort and those who take risks. This provides no more incentive to become rich, because becoming rich is incentive enough.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[BarbaraHudson]

If everyone has a guaranteed income, but other income claws it back at the rate of, say, 50 cents on the dollar, people still have the incentive to work to have more money. And of course, someone making 3x or 5x or 10x the guaranteed income doesn't give a hoot anyway.

That's how we do it here with income redistribution for seniors.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[Ravaldy]

Yes. I agree with that. I won't claim to know what will happen to the less fortunate but what I do know is that human kind has always adjusted.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[HornWumpus]

What? The fed buys bonds at auction. Stepping in whenever there is danger of the treasury having to pay a market interest rate.

Again: Got a link for the fed buying bonds on the secondary market?

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[BoberFett]

Those things are currently reimbursed via the free market at exactly the rate they're worth: $0.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[BoberFett]

So by being a part of this discussion with you right now, you believe that I've justified forcing someone else to grow my food, sew my clothes, and build my home? Is there any bar too low for your measure of "contribution"?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[bad-badtz-maru]

It was a joke, have you ever looked at the "food" available at a sporting event?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[jwhitener]

"That's ignoring U6.....before all the definitional changes"

If you are getting your info from Fox news / conservative radio shows, I won't bother trying to change your mind by running through the de-bunking info.

If you are not getting your news from biased sources and are open to learning, please look into this further. Because you are wrong. This "ignoring the U6" and the "definitions have changed" is just flat out wrong. The job numbers are being measured exactly like they have been since Reagan. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics is consistent.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[lsatenstein]

All it can do is change the work you do.

I am sick and tired of Luddites that claim robots will steal all the jobs.

Jobs are not a limited resource. Jobs are dependent on things we need to get done.

Once upon the time 100% of jobs were focused on getting food. Hunting and gathering became full time work when population was high. Once farming came around, it freed up some people to do other things. They did not suddenly become lazy do-nothing people. Instead they took up lower priority tasks, and turned them into full time jobs.

Things like clothing manufacturing, which used to be done in your spare time, turned into full industries. New products like shoes, alcohol, luxuries etc. were created.

The question is, are there still things we need to do, but have not been able to afford? The answer to that is YES. We have education, science, space exploration, green technologies, and a host of other things that we has decided would be nice, but we simply don't have the manpower to do.

We will not run out of jobs, instead we will do things that we can not even imagine today. Anymore than a hunter/gatherer could imagine someone would be paid to sell food at a basketball game.

I turned to writing slashdot reponses and to doing Sudoku puzzles.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[lsatenstein]

The farm equipment replacement cycle is around 1 machine every 20 years. True new technology is appearing for Industrial farming. But then, the jobs left are menial, -- fruit pickers, vegetable pickers, etc.

And most farming in warm climates is for two cycles of planting per year. Not many labour resources in that, is there?

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[lsatenstein]

Not to mention that the removal of the new deal and systematic attack on labor has made sure that the benefirts of that productivity has gone to mostly the top .01%.

George Jetson, on the famous cartoon show, used to complain how long the 3 day work weeks were! Everyone that put in work was supposed to benefit. It isn't working out that way.

As technology replaces jobs, look for more crime. It will be the new industry. When you need to survive, and there are no jobs, and begging does not bring in enough money, there are few choices. -- Live from the handouts of family is one, and crime is the other. Religion wont help you, because its not there to stop you, it is there for repentance.

Re: Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[hackwrench]

No. I believe that housing and feeding everyone is what's good for society and once a person believes in what's good for society they don't have to be forced to do the right thing. Money shouldn't be used to force anyone to do anything, but there still needs to be a form of record keeping to be assist in keeping everyone up to date with society's needs.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[jwhitener]

You need to make a link between government debt and your ability to retire earlier due to productivity gains. I don't think it exists. Government debt is not like household debt.

Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work.

[catprog]

So a effective 50% tax rate on the poorest people?

Caution: Whatsapp as business model cited in TFA

[rmdingler]

I guess we could cross train as fast response robotics repairmen, unless it is only a matter of time before that job is mechanized, too. Sigh.

This is politics, not technology

[mbone]

When will people get it through their heads that this is really all about the acceleration of the transfer of wealth from the middle class to the wealthy, and is fundamentally a political matter, not a technical matter?

From TFA "The report calls for a long-term plan to make economic growth inclusive." We had that. It was called the New Deal, and it was dismantled in the 1980's by the Reagan Administration.

Re:This is politics, not technology

[jellomizer]

Most of politics are just talking heads. The Free Market will make jobs.

The key issue with Technology is that it is taking up those low level jobs, where the strapping young fellow can get their feet wet in the business world, and work their way up the corporation for bigger and better things.

Technology replaces these jobs in particular areas, which makes working up the company difficult.

There isn't much demand for the starting paper pushing type of job, computers are good at moving data from one spot to another. So the new college grad, no longer gets a job, where he is interacting with all the people in the organization and getting a good handle on the bigger picture on how the place works. So in order to work at the organization you need to have a particular speciality in place. Thus being placed in a particular department with little chance of moving out. So your career growth now becomes moving companies as there is limited growth at just any one company.

Re:This is politics, not technology

[MickyTheIdiot]

Maybe if the US *had* a free market I would agree with you.

Hint: we don't. There is a gigantic thumb on one side of the scale.

Re:This is politics, not technology

[itzly]

Any free market will get corrupted. It's inevitable.

Re:This is politics, not technology

[JackieBrown]

And so will any non-free market. Do you honestly think that government is not corruptible?

Re:This is politics, not technology

[RabidReindeer]

Any free market will get corrupted. It's inevitable.

That's just as bad as "The Free Market Solves All Problems!"

Free Markets exist. It's just that in today's world, relatively few of them are major markets. Even if both corruption and government (there IS a small area where the twain are not one and the same) could be eliminated from the picture, markets often have other limitations and/or mechanisms that sooner or later convert them to non-free markets.

Likewise, it's just as unrealistic and simplistic to believe that just because all of the preceding revolutions in labor have led to job creation that the trend can continue ad infinitum. The real world is just not a simple place.

Once we've reduced the cost and labor for necessities, we focus on luxuries. Once we've got a glut of luxuries as well, where do we go next?

Or do we adopt the Huxley model, re-introduce gratuitous manual labor and for the more intelligent, designing ever more-complicated editions of Mechanical Bumble-Puppy?

Re:This is politics, not technology

[tmosley]

So lets just stick with the already corrupt system.

I guess you never brush your teeth either.

Re:This is politics, not technology

[HornWumpus]

Free enough markets are typical.

Free markets are an ideal that can never be realized in detail.

Re:This is politics, not technology

[RabidReindeer]

Free enough markets are typical.

Free markets are an ideal that can never be realized in detail.

I'm sorry. You are located in the wrong century. Only absolutes are accepted here.

Re:This is politics, not technology

[DarkOx]

Likewise, it's just as unrealistic and simplistic to believe that just because all of the preceding revolutions in labor have led to job creation that the trend can continue ad infinitum. The real world is just not a simple place.

I don't think its simplistic or unrealistic. There will always be scarcities and things people wish they could have more of even as the stuff of our basic needs is present in ever greater abundance. The more efficient our technology allows us to be the more activity we can engage in. When you no longer have to dedicate all your human resources to hunting and gathering because you have agriculture you free up time for people to do other things, like weave carpets for your huts etc, improve your standard of living. People talk about the wealth gap getting bigger and it is but on the other hand our generations mode life style is better than that of our parents unless we start making false comparisons (which people do all the time).

You probably live in a home which is less drafty, drive a car that is smoother and safer, have the luxury of a stupifing selection of entertainment products, you sit in front of a machine that allows you to discuss topics like this with others from around the globe at almost no variable cost, spend less time cooking and cleaning, etc.

The trick is when do these additional activities decrease in value below the point it makes sense for us to invest the one truly scarce thing we have, time, into. The 40 hour work week was the post industrial answer, enough people realized that as a society we needed more leisure time, more than we needed a better standard of living in terms of goods. If anything people needed time to consume all this great stuff we were producing so we could continue to sell it to one another.

We are hitting that wall again in the "developed world" a 35 hour work week would make sense. Have all the office an shift workers do 9-5 with lunch rather than 8-5. Companies can either higher more workers or pay over time 5 hours sooner.

Its going to take some market protections though. We need to shitcan this idea of free trade with unequal partners. Workers in developed countries need economic protection for trade partners that lack similar labor, safety and environmental regulations. Foreign labor needs to be tariff-ed just like goods. That is we need to create a tax liability for salary expenditures payed to "overseas" workers.

Re:This is politics, not technology

[tlhIngan]

Perhaps it's time for a little reading.

If we cooperate and realize that robots can serve us within limits, we can have a place where employment is optional (but still manage scarcity). Or if we just let greed take over and the robots will be the ones that oppress us.

Manna - By Marshall Brain explores these issues by seeing how machines initially take over, then following through with two different outcomes.

Of course the TL;DR version of it (I highly suggest reading the full thing first) is on Wikipedia.

Re:This is politics, not technology

[RabidReindeer]

I won't say that I disagree with you, but the push for a 40-hour week goes all the way back to the 19th Century.

I'd say that the actual need for a work week longer than 35 hours probably vanished somewhere around the 1980s, if the sudden rise in "disposable employees" back then is any indication.

Re:This is politics, not technology

[DarkOx]

the push for a 40-hour week goes all the way back to the 19th Century

Well I am glad you agree but I am confused by your comment. The industrial revolution took place in the late 18th thru the begging of the early 19th century. While industrialization was still expanding into new areas of life the "revolution" aspect of it was largely over by 1820 or so. Pushes for limits on the work day, i believe started in Britain around the same time.

So I think we also agree that 40-hour week dates to the 19th Century and near to the start of it, even if we don't see its broad implementation until the 1860's and as late as the 1930's in many places we would nominally consider to have been the developed world at the time.

To that end you may be entirely correct about your 1980's target for the 40 hour weeks obsolescence in terms of the economic need. That is heartening, perhaps we are on the cusp of change. Its clear form the amount of time it took for the 40 hour weeks implementation to become most peoples reality there is some lag on working less due to social norms and other economic dislocations occurring simultaneously like the full realization of globalism.

Re:This is politics, not technology

[RabidReindeer]

OK. I considered my reference date relative to the point (approximately) when it was more likely that you'd work in a factory than on a farm, hence the discrepancy.

The opposition to a 40-hour week was very public on the behalf of the Captains of Industry who boldly claimed that if the lesser classes (workers) were allowed weekends off, they'd waste the time in drinking and dissolute living. Very "white man's burden".

By the 1980s the world had discarded the conceit that the upper classes were genetically and inherently superior, but most workers figured they were OK with 40 hours. Management, however, knew that 40 hours was now more work than they were actually doing, hence the changeover to "perma-temp" jobs. Although some volunteered to reduced hours, the extra value (productivity) they were adding wasn't being reflected in their paychecks, so to earn 40 hours worth of salary, they had to "work" 40 hours or, alternatively, actually work 40 hours at the expense of some other employee being laid off entirely.

We could have adopted one of several different solutions.

1. We could have raised taxes and let the goddam socialist gubmint spread the benefits around.

2. The companies could have voluntarily raised employee compensation.

3. The companies could have paid out larger dividends to shareholders. Ideally with promoting some scheme whereby ordinary employees would be shareholders.

4. The companies could have re-invented themselves to be better, cleaner, and overall more admirable by spending on R&D, especially "green" R&D, more companies could have sponsored cultural efforts (creative works, as opposed to simply buying names on football stadiums), and so forth.

Instead we got:

5. The extra money was employed in heavy merger and acquisition activity. The M&A game is as often as not a cycle whereby a company buys another company, guts it, sends its unwanted executives away with golden parachutes and its line employees away with token severance payments (maybe), shrinks the available Free Market for its products (assuming one was present to begin with), and not infrequently ejects the digested remains a couple of years later to begin the cycle again. In the mean time, the brokers skim generously off the cash that's flying back and forth, doing relatively little work (maybe a couple of weeks of intensive number-crunching, as opposed to the years it takes to build a successful company).

AND the C-level executives sent their salaries into the stratosphere. Instead of 400 line-level employees producing products - and BUYING products, you can have 400 unemployed, 1 fat cat buying relatively little out of the mainstream economy (overpriced real estate isn't much of a job creator).

After 20-30 years of this last, ordinary folk find themselves growing more impoverished even as we can afford more luxuries, and the whole economic fabric is beginning to creak.

Something obviously will get done. What we have now was inconceivable back in the time of Richard the Lionhearted, and most likely what we'll end up with will be equally different. The question is: what?

Re:This is politics, not technology

[Baldorcete]

And: How?

Re:Caution: Whatsapp as business model cited in TF

[xanthines-R-yummy]

Ha! I'm already training to be a robotics repairmen repairman!

Nothing

[gwjgwj]

n/t

Robots are better...

[unixcorn]

Robots are better than humans at certain tasks and typically make a product more consistent and reliable. However, I am not sure if world filled with machines doing all the work would be a utopia or a dystopia. On the other hand, maybe by mechanizing we can bring industries back to the US that left for cheap labor. And, of course someone has to fix the machines.

Re:Robots are better...

[operator_error]

This is Apple Corporation's plan to wean themselves off Foxconn and all associated issues.

High variance, low validity

[buchner.johannes]

"My predictions have enormously high variance, I can imagine completely plausible, incredibly positive scenarios, but they're only about as probable as actually quite dystopian futures that I can imagine."

The future is uncertain, and we can not predict this aspect with the information we have. So how valid is the 30-50% number then, if it is +-50%?

If you can't beat them, join them...

[HideyoshiJP]

...sexually.

Re:If you can't beat them, join them...

[boristdog]

I'm safe until they produce a better sexbot. After that, who the fuck will care?

Re:Caution: Whatsapp as business model cited in TF

[Dr_Barnowl]

Only because the Scutters had a better union....

AI could lead to Star Trek utopia.

[terrence_bull9354]

I wrote an article in exactly this topic https://www.linkedin.com/pulse... - maybe I am an optimist, but I don't see a down side to automation - unless maybe it becomes the exclusive domain of the big corporates or super rich.

What do I do when robots take over my job?

[Lumpy]

I freak the hell out, because I program the robots.

Re:What do I do when robots take over my job?

[Lumpy]

Shhh, dont tell my supervisor., that fleshy bag of water will never see the uprising...

everyones out of a job!

[the_Bionic_lemming]

What good are robots if no one has a job earning money to buy the products made by the robots?

Re:everyones out of a job!

[ScentCone]

What good are robots if no one has a job earning money to buy the products made by the robots?

It's OK, the left has a plan for that. Just raise taxes on the remaining people who have jobs, and give that money to everyone else. This is always plan A (and plan B, and plan C). Ideally, there would only be one single productive person, to cut down on the paperwork.

Re:everyones out of a job!

[Khashishi]

Don't be silly. The robot owners will have plenty of money for buying products made by robots.

Re:everyones out of a job!

[Fire_Wraith]

Sure it is. It's "supply and demand" for a reason. Demand is a necessary component of a market economy. If there's no demand for my products, nobody is buying them, I'm not making money, so I should make something else that the markets do want. And who makes up those markets? People. One of the (many) reasons why a Soviet-style command economy didn't work is because it lacked those signaling mechanisms. Factories produced what the party apparatchiks arbitrarily decided should be produced. We don't do that in a market economy - we make something because people are willing to buy it (market demand).

Let me put it another way. Just how much of the activity of the US economy is devoted to things like food, clothes, housing, and other basic living expenses/needs? It's certainly a sizeable chunk. What happens if a bunch of those people are suddenly out of jobs and can't pay for those things anymore? It would be an economic calamity, because now all the people who used to work running farms and restaurants and stores and such are soon going to be out of THEIR jobs... and so on down the line.

Re:everyones out of a job!

[gzuckier]

“We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.” Buckminster Fuller

Re:everyones out of a job!

[ScentCone]

It's true. Nobody should have to work. Everyone should just get everything they need from ... oh, wait, nobody's working. Huh.

Re:everyones out of a job!

[gzuckier]

It's true. Nobody should have to work. Everyone should just get everything they need from ... oh, wait, nobody's working. Huh.

In case you missed the previous thousand posts, 1)there is more and more stuff around, cheaper and cheaper 2)at the same time as fewer and fewer people are working 3)also we have robots now whose productivity is pretty high and need very few humans involved

Re:everyones out of a job!

[ScentCone]

Excellent! So, now we can have a core group of smart, hard working people, and they can be slaves to the completely uneducated leisure class. That's going to be super-duper successful, and will definitely inspire more people to study hard.

Humans Need Not Apply

[pauljlucas]

This (plausible) scenario has already been covered by CGP Grey.

good thing.

[schematix]

I'm just glad my job is to automate machines. Should ensure job security until I can make a machine to replace myself.

Mouse Utopia Experiment

[majapahit]

The most probable outcome of the "positive scenario" could be drawn from John Calhoun's Mouse Utopia experiment and it doesn't end well YouTube: Mouse Utopia Experiment

Re:Mouse Utopia Experiment

[tmosley]

Except its fine if you just keep increasing the size of the environment. It's a big universe out there.

Leverage

[frank_adrian314159]

It's all about that. Eventually, the fulcrum is strong enough for a very few creatures to lift the world. And then they start fighting over which is stronger or which is right. So the world falls. More leverage, more risk; less leverage, less risk. Period. The world is now collateral damage to any idiot with a gripe. You're all going to have to learn to behave a bit more civilized to each other, regardless of who started it, or I'm going to have to send you all to your rooms for a long evolutionary time-out.

Love,
Mother Earth, Physics, and Mathematics

P.S. I've worked with you quite a lot, you know... millions of years. Why can't you stop being a bunch of assholes? :cc The Universe

Re:C4

[davester666]

Rampage!

Re:Socialism or barbarism

[backslashdot]

Uh, or we can have 90% private ownership with some social ownership? I mean in the future, maybe instead of investing in education (which will be freely available, in fact it already is) .. we will invest in companies. So basically people will just make money off their mutual funds. People who never had any savings, they can be given shares on a charitable basis. I mean, the government can tax the automated factories and provide some welfare off that. I mean this sort of thing is possible today, if you own shares in a successful company like Apple you can just live off the dividends. This is the equivalent of "owning a robot", it does the work .. you get paid for it.

Re:Not gonna happen

[Anonymous Coward]

So your livelihood is entirely propped up by the legal fiction of intellectual property. The same legal "right" that is generally disregarded by the common man, decided in civil courts by who has the largest checkbook, and regarded by the intellectuals as stretched past its original intention and untenable.

"Living off your own intellectual property" is one scratch of a lawmaker's pen away from ceasing to be. If your "works" attract the eye of a major corporation in the wrong mood, you could end up bankrupt trying to defend it. (Your castle is built of sand.)

Re:UK has NHS and more worker rights so they may b

[HornWumpus]

The pound is in the worst shape of any major western currency.

10 years ago the UK realized they had a problem with unfunded pensions for their baby boom and started working on it, with accounting tricks. Their balance sheet now looks better, all pensions are off book.

Nothing to do

[Falos]

Look. Look there, at that guy. The young, healthy frycook.

Maybe he's heard that without exclusive skills, he'll end up in terrafoam someday, so he's decided to try and buy a ticket from the diploma printers, and trying to scrape together at least SOME of the gouging education costs (which have long since skyrocketed past "easily afforded with a 20h/wk part-time") rather than become another sucker hooked by the predatory student loan system.

Is there anything for this guy to do? We're already post-labor. We don't pay shit for "labor". There are no ditch diggers. Even those burgers he's flipping, he's only paid because he has the "skills" required for a warm body to deliver a result. The warm body itself is worthless.

Is there anything for this guy to do? He has a few options today, but the moment a robo-cook's cost ticks under his $8/hr or whatever? The existence of that job will evaporate. Globally. "Overnight", if you will.

Is there anything for this guy to do? There's a lot of naive posts saying "There will be jobs" with examples like fucking scientist. We have an ideal, motivated homo sapien right here, eager to work and rearing to go, and no robo-owner will look twice because nothing he does is worth money.

We're in tech, we've got some of the best tickets for The Ark, but we're not going to need ten billion robot repairmen.

Re:Nothing to do

[Fire_Wraith]

That's exactly the problem. The value of unskilled/low-skilled labor is rapidly dwindling. It used to be that as an able-bodied adult male, you could support yourself, and even a family, with only the willingness to work hard and get your hands dirty. That isn't the case any more, and it's been growing less and less true over the past few decades. We have less and less need for unskilled labor every year. Eventually there will be so little demand for it that we're either going to have to just straight up be willing to pay people to do nothing, or go down some rather dark dystopian routes.

Probably the best solution will be some form of guaranteed basic income. At some point, the robots will be productive enough that we can just pay people a (very basic) salary just for being adult citizens. It would go to everyone, and anything you earn from working or investing would go on top of that, so people still have an incentive to work, create, etc, because they want that shiny new car or that sunny tropical vacation. You could get rid of the minimum wage, because it isn't needed anymore, and let the markets work out the value of any remaining labor. People would be free to engage in other pursuits, like crafts and hobbies that otherwise might make some money, but not enough to live on. We'd save money on administering it, because there's a lot less overhead in sending everyone a check than the current system. Would we be paying those people who choose to just sit at home and have kids? Yes, partly because birth rates are falling below replacement levels everywhere in the developed world. Some countries have already been trying to encourage their citizens to have more kids, so their populations don't start declining (or decline worse than they have). The only ones that aren't have been replacing it with immigration (like the US), and even that won't work forever, as formerly undeveloped countries modernize (see the changes in the Mexican Birth rate over the past century, for instance). And more importantly, we'd still have people who need to (and can) buy the stuff the robots are making, because producers can't exist for long without consumers.

Re:Nothing to do

[AnonymousFryCook]

Right in the feels man. Right in the feels :(

Re:C4

[Penguinisto]

That needs to be said in the classic Unreal Tournament style voice...

Meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised to see violence as a response to automation, but I doubt that you'll be able to use explosives to take out all automation... a lot of that automation is happening outside of the physical/manufacturing realm, and is definitely happening in the IT world (see also DevOps, albeit that's still in its embryonic stages).

This means no one in our little realm should feel smug and safe; a good Puppet/cfengine config (coupled with good processes across the board from dev to release to maintenance) can knock off at least 20-30% of a given traditional mixed-environment sysadmin team's headcount, with the surviving employees still around for corner-cases, upgrades, and new technologies as they roll in. A good SCOM config (heh) can do the same to maybe 40-50% of a team of MCSE types in a Microsoft-only shop. QA types will likely see the greatest threat, though, given automated testing.

Devs? They'll likely remain fairly safe from automation, but they have their own headaches anyway (see also the greater ease of outsourcing/offshoring in that realm.)

All that said, this doesn't mean massive waves of unemployment... instead it means that the displaced folks (or those facing it) cannot afford to sit back and let things stand pat; I suspect that the pace of learning new stuff will quicken, perhaps back to the pace set by the dot-boom era.

Just offhand opinion though - YMMV of course.
(Disclosure: I made the transition to DevOps awhile back, so take it as you will.)

Enjoy life

[darkwing_bmf]

Clearly if robots do all the work it means that humans will have more free time to enjoy life. Unless the political class prevents it for some reason in which case we could use the free time to revolt.

Re:Enjoy life

[darkwing_bmf]

I'm sure you're creative enough to find other excuses to socialize. There's travel, hobbies, education, or just take a stroll in the park, relax for a bit, sit on the park bench and talk to the other guy or gal doing the same. It's not hard if you try.

Re:Enjoy life

[Justpin]

Revolt? In the past body guards of tyrants would join in the revolution often in Roman times they were the assassins. But if robotisation gets so advanced then what stops the political class living in compounds guarded by auto gun turrets which use lasers (so fewer moving parts and less maintenance and ammo costs) with killer robots to suppress crowds? Look at 1989 in China they locked the local Beijing Garrison and brought troops from many provinces away to suppress the Tienanmen sq protests.

Re:Enjoy life

[darkwing_bmf]

Well slavery would bring full employment. Which is what the robot haters want anyway.

Re:Not gonna happen

[ArcadeMan]

Your job, assuming your rights were protected 100% against illegal copying, still require people to pay for your intellectual property. And media is one of the first thing to go when a family budget gets tight. So your last hope would be to collect a huge amount per copy since only the rich will be able to afford it but there's a lot less rich people than middle class or lower class people. And even the rich people won't pay for your works past a certain amount, so whatever happens you still won't be able to live off that.

So your title is absolutely correct if it's the answer of your last sentence.

You're living in a dream world.

it is business, not politics

[swell]

In the US, a corporation has only one mandate- maximize profits for shareholders. There is no rule about being nice to employees or customers or suppliers or environment. There is no rule against manipulating governments in ways that increase profits. There are legions of lawyers across the land who will sue on behalf of shareholders if there is a perceived failure to take a profit opportunity.

This is the reason our society is polarized between the 1% and the rest. There are owners and there are workers. The owners enjoy low taxes and high profits. The workers compete for the scraps and pay for the war machines and government surveillance. The workers appear in the company books as an expense. To maximize profits, that expense must be minimized. CEO bonuses are largely based upon how that expense is minimized.

A new kind of corporation called 'Public Benefit Corporation' is emerging in some states. It allows profit, but these companies have a larger purpose that takes priority. This idea, if supported by the public, could help bring balance to the economy. OTOH if we keep buying from Public Screwing Corporations, abandon all hope.

Re:C4

[Duhavid]

"All that said, this doesn't mean massive waves of unemployment... instead it means that the displaced folks (or those facing it) cannot afford to sit back and let things stand pat; I suspect that the pace of learning new stuff will quicken, perhaps back to the pace set by the dot-boom era."

If there are fewer jobs, how can it not mean unemployment?
Education may make one person more hire-able for an opening, but it will not create additional jobs.

Re:C4

[Penguinisto]

I should have specified temporary versus permanent unemployment, I suspect.

Bad news, your work is already at risk!

[Eloking]

Here's a scoop, Chinese and other cheap labour can already replace you for a fraction of the cost. Yeah robot could mean less manufacturing job for us, but it's better than losing the whole company if it move oversea.

Re:C4

[tburkhol]

If there are fewer jobs, how can it not mean unemployment?

Not fewer jobs, different jobs. When the cotton gin put all the seed-pullers out of work, it created demand for cotton pickers. When steamships put the wind jammers out of business, it created demand for longshoremen. You (and I) may not be clever enough to figure out what to do when they automate elevator operators or McWendyKing burger flippers, but there will be something, even for unskilled workers. Think about how many baristas there were in 1980. Or how many microbreweries in 1990. Kids today are going to work in fields that didn't exist 10 years ago.

Re:Socialism or barbarism

[Khashishi]

I suppose this is the natural progression from a capitalist economy, but it isn't ideal. There will always be animosity from the haves toward the have-nots for being forced to pay welfare from what they rightfully "earned", and the have-nots toward the haves for owning the vast majority of shares.

Re:Can we outsource our top jobs to robots.

[MickyTheIdiot]

Congress could be replaced by 600 ebay auctions at this point in history. That's even more simple than the robot plan.

Another way of stating the problem

[presidenteloco]

4) We've engineered the world to produce our needs and material wants without much supervision or labor.
      a. Now what do we do with our time, and
      b. how do we value ourselves and
      c. each other?

Personally, I would have no trouble with a. I have an infinite capacity for defining new questions and projects and explorations to fill more than my lifetime.
b. I suspect would not be an issue for most people if it weren't for nasty tendencies in our nature or aculturation around c.

So for my money (or should I say my issued-at-birth crypto currency barter economy exchange tokens), c. is what we need to think hard on and be culturally ingenious about now.

deal with it

[paul mafinga]

30 years ago a bank was loaded with employees. 20-30 people was not uncommon, and several minutes in line was the norm just to speak to a teller.

Consider that greco-roman slavery allowed people to lay back, relax, and ponder the universe. The only problem was harming innocent people.

So robots are going to replace human labor. So what? They will make us clothes, food, and housing.

Eventually AI will supersede human intelligence. So what? They will make better decisions.

Why so-celled tech geeks keep demanding job creation is bizarre. Ideally, you'd want to eliminate labor entirely.

I already solved this

[bluefoxlucid]

Amazon's automated warehouses become K-Mart's automated stock rooms. Check-out lines are replaced by assisted self-checkout, allowing one cashier to run 4-6 checkouts. Hamburger makers are replaced by hamburger making machines. Auto manufacturers use a fully machine-tooled line with only a few workers for final assembly. It's coming.

Our welfare system, in 2013, cost $1.62 trillion, of which $1.28 trillion was Federal spending. This is made up of Social Security Old-Age Pensions, Supplemental Disability Insurance, Food stamps, WIC, income security programs, unemployment, and the HUD direct housing voucher program. Just the Federal spending accounts for 37% of Federal spending, 46% of Federal taxes taken, and 55% of all Corporate and Individual income taxes taken at the Federal level.

If we drop the payroll OASDI tax and roll OASDI into general income, all income taxes increase by 9.34%. If we then slice those incomes by 55% and apply a 17.0% separate Dividend Tax on all currently-taxed Income, our tax brackets move from 16.2% on the lowest income earners and 39.6% on the highest income earners to 25.69% and 38.99%. Low-income earners around $9,000 income will take home $5000 more per year; middle-income earners at the $120,000 level will about break even; above that, it increases as high as a 3.17% take-home decrease around $400,000, again breaking even around exactly $2,000,000.

The base income tax system is progressive, and can be adjusted to smooth this out as appropriate; reducing the income taxes at the lowest level to around 0% would return the system to something resembling our current tax structure, with a 3% increase at the highest end. Considering this along with the above, the total taxes taken can raise from 16.2% to 17% on the most poor, and 39.6% to around 43% on the most rich. This compares favorably against current proposals to tax Millionaires and Billionaires at 45%, 50%, 60%, and 80%. Minimizing the taxes in the poor and middle-class ranges is a practical matter: it reduces their wage demand, reducing the cost of labor and slowing down all future transitions to new management strategies designed to reduce labor expenses; such management strategies have higher base cost, but lower labor utilization, and thus are cheaper only when labor is expensive or when the base costs factors of the new strategy have been refined into a significantly inexpensive form.

The 17% Dividend tax would be distributed among every natural-born, resident, American citizen over the age of 18. This specifically excludes the abuses of immigrants flooding to America to live on free Government money, and immigrants crossing the border illegally to birth an American citizen who then goes to live in Cuba or Mexico or wherever with a pension coming at age 18. It also excludes the abuse of welfare families popping out more babies to get at an additional per-child stipend by simply not providing one. The Dividend amounts to $6,558 in 2013; with the typical 3.4% total income growth per year, this amounts to $7,010 in 2015.

In 2013, a 750sqft apartment in a lower-class neighborhood rented for $725/mo, or $0.96 cents per square foot. Assuming an inflated $1.34/sqft, a 224sqft apartment could rent for $300. The model apartment houses a single adult individual and consists of a 6'x9' bedroom suitable to contain a twin bed and a small end-table dresser; a 10'x9' sitting room; a bathroom including a 3'x3' shower stall with corner sink basin and spigot mounted inside, totaling 20 sqft; and an 80sqft kitchen, one counter surface separating it from the sitting room to function as a prep surface and a dining table. These living arrangements provide an improvement over the standard soggy cardboard box inhabited by 600,000 of the United States's poor.

Assuming $300 for rent, out of the 2013 $546/mo, $246 remain. The cost of food is

Re:I already solved this

[Iamthecheese]

You have my vote.

Re:I already solved this

[Qzukk]

Politics aside, the biggest problem with this is going to be the housing. Those "low end" apartments almost certainly didn't spring into existence at $0.96/sqft, but upgrading the 600,000 people from soggy cardboard is going to require a lot of new construction, and people building new things are going to want money for that wood, brick and property, even if the entire structure is built with robots. Terrafoam to the rescue, I guess.

That said, if you're willing to not own a lot of stuff or have a bedroom, it looks like 242sqft is plenty of space. It's probably pretty standard in Tokyo too.

Re:I already solved this

[Osgeld]

course it all depends on where you live, my apartment is larger than 750 sqft, is in a nice neighborhood and is all ground level, for 600 a month, and I am thinking of moving cause its getting a bit pricey

Re:I already solved this

[bluefoxlucid]

Why does everyone say say, "Oh, but poor people will want to live in upper-class areas, and that's not enough?" They're unemployed, they have zero money in savings, they've been forced out of Florida by the police after the ban on homeless people. They'll go where they can; and there will be a market somewhere. Even New York and San Francisco have slums.

Re:I already solved this

[bluefoxlucid]

This is true. A lot of landlords were, at some point a few years ago, sitting on vacant buildings that didn't need tons of work. Strip interior walls and redo the floor plan, and you go from a 6-bedroom unit to an 18-bedroom unit. Filling 18 units at more than 1/3 as much is going to bring a profit; I put in my calculations at $1.33/sqft instead of $0.96/sqft to ensure housing viability.

Re:what to do....

[MrL0G1C]

And what if USA doesn't need 60 million robot repair people?

Re:Not gonna happen

[PopeRatzo]

Your job, assuming your rights were protected 100% against illegal copying, still require people to pay for your intellectual property. And media is one of the first thing to go when a family budget gets tight. So your last hope would be to collect a huge amount per copy since only the rich will be able to afford it but there's a lot less rich people than middle class or lower class people. And even the rich people won't pay for your works past a certain amount, so whatever happens you still won't be able to live off that.

Every single one of your assumptions about my job are false.

1) My rights are protected because I'm the only one providing my product and no one else can duplicate it. Not because of legal protections, but because it is perfectly unique.
2) My main income stream has nothing to do with "media", although I do get a little side income from that. Intellectual property laws do not protect my actual product and in fact, could not possibly do so.
3) My product is impossible to copy, because it is the result of a very unique set of circumstances. If you want it, you have to come to me. I suppose someone who wanted to approximate what I've done could do so, but it would take them a few decades if they started today, and even then it would only be approximately the same (thought it might be better, I suppose). .
4) I do not have to charge a large amount per instance. In fact, I've created a non-profit to make sure my product is available to people who might otherwise not be able to afford it (and those who might not have access for other reasons).
5) Finally, there are so many "rich people" (your term, not mine) who want my product that I have to turn about 70% away because the product is so limited.
6) The best part, is that it's something I will make even when I no longer have to in order to pay the bills, because it's so enjoyable doing so and makes me so happy.

Your sig seems to indicate you are into bitcoins. That might explain why you are unable to grasp the very simple concept of my unique business.

Re:Not gonna happen

[ArcadeMan]

Care to explain your unique business instead of just being vague? Do you have a website?

Homestead

[pubwvj]

When the robots take your job robots and material goods will become cheap too. Return to the land. Produce your own food and many other things. Enjoy life. Fret less. Be.

Re:Homestead

[PPH]

Return to the land.

Can't do that any more. Property taxes are based on the 'best use' of a piece of land. The best use of all that farmland is more data centers. So cough up the taxes, buddy.

They've got you in debt to the company store from the day you are born.

Re:C4

[geekoid]

Except automation started replacing more jobs then it created at the end of the 90s.

I wrote a piece of automation software that put 10,000+ people out of work in a year. Most the people where office workers approving loans. Most where 35+.

What, exactly did they go off and create? What new jobs were created? Office around the country were closed, so what happened ti the urtiary markets? Oh, it fell apart and never recovered.

You're examples are from a industrial age where there where a lot of open and variable resources, no global logistics, and mostly lead to MORE people being unemployed then employed based on volume of work.

Average income is dropping, but GDP is rising.

your example requires that an increase in consumerism to hold out, but that can not happen with income droppin, and debt climbing.

What happens when?

[high_rolla]

Something I have sometimes thought about is what happens when all these jobs are replaced?

If a large amount of the population doesn't have work, and a significant other chunk is worried it may soon join it. Then they either don't have money to spend, or are scared to spend what little they have. Once this gets over a certain point then businesses lose a large amount of their paying customers, leading to further job losses, and falling profits and snowballing the situation. Governments also lose out as revenue from taxes decreases sharply (and as such may not be able to support the unemployed). Those who do have the money are also particularly good at not giving it to the government.

What happens then? Do governments collapse and the uber wealthy step in and say 'we are your new overlords'? We effectively go back to monarchy?
Or do we have massive uprisings as this time we don't have uneducated peasants at the bottom but somewhat educated people who can understand what is happening and also use technology to collaborate? Do new companies spring up, willing to offer products at reaonable prices and take business away from the greedy ones? Does traditional currency get set aside and replaced with new ones, causing a reset and effectively destroying the wealth of the wealthy? Or something completely different, taking into account factors I've missed?

47%

[mcswell]

47%, not 46% or 48%. I smell fish. If they'd said 50% (or better, half), I might have believed them.

It takes 2-4 years to retrain someone

[Salgat]

Require that companies that "eliminate" jobs with automation offer those who have been laid off full funding (with obvious limitations, no $100,000 private education) to cover either an Associates degree, Bachelors degree, or an apprenticeship (basically sponsor them so that they are more appealing to unions and companies that offer an apprenticeship program). That gives people a cushion and opportunity to move to a new job, limiting the impact of transitioning from their old position that was removed.

Negative feedback loop

[aXis100]

So, robots start replacing jobs because they can make widget X cheaper.

As unemployment increases, less poeple will have the money required to buy widet X. The manufacturers will have to lower prices in order to get sales, and their cost reductions through robots will evaporate. Meanwhile everything just got cheaper.

At some point we'll reach equilibrium again, where the cost benefit of adding a robot will be balanced by the lack of sales due to poeple not having an income. It might be painfull for a while until we get there, but it will happen.

Re:what to do....

[roc97007]

It probably doesn't. But the smart ones who get started early enough will benefit. And for the rest, well, there's always food service.

Re:what to do....

[MrL0G1C]

Nope, robots are doing 99% of the food service and those jobs are disappearing because not many people can afford to eat out because they don't have jobs.

Re:Not gonna happen

[PopeRatzo]

Meaning, you're a sperm donor. Your DNA may be unique, but your service isn't very original.

No, but I can guarantee fast delivery.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:what to do....

[roc97007]

So what's the solution? Ban automation?

They took our job!!!

[snowsnoot]

http://youtu.be/768h3Tz4Qik

You're forgetting the 60 years of misery

[rsilvergun]

that followed the industrial revolution until tech caught up and there was something for people to do again. You're ignoring 2 or 3 lost generations. You're doing this content and safe because you're assuming you'll be dead before the layoffs get to you; and you can't or you're not willing to imagine the same thing happening to your children (or you're a /. meme and you don't have any).

Here's the thing: We CAN imagine it. All of it. You choose not to.

Congrats

[rsilvergun]

You just discovered Basic Income. Step forward and get your prize.

That said, I love the idea of rebranding it as a "dividend". You might actually sneak it past the 1% that way. Good luck.

Re:Congrats

[bluefoxlucid]

It's a Dividend because it's taken as a percentage of the total income from the economy. When you work, you start with $0 and end up with $60,000; when a business works, it pays out its expenses (including wages), and ends up with millions in the end. All that income is just the profit of the whole economy; you take 17% of it and share that among all the stakeholders. Every individual human is an equal shareholder in the economy.

The classic Georgeist way to do this is to use a Land Value Tax; but taxing land value is just an arbitrary tax. The theory is land has a certain economic value potential--you can profit so many dollars per acre of land--and so you're taxed based on a percentage of that value; for practical reasons, this is usually adjusted to the market: if it's a super market, it's got a different Land Value than an apartment building on the same spot; and the Land Value of a market in Baltimore is different than the Land Value of a market in New York. In short: a bunch of people try to guess what your income should be, and levy an income tax on imaginary income.

From what I can tell, the above strategy is just a pretend-not-Income-tax. I turned it into a flat income tax.

It's not just a basic income; it's a full deployment plan for a basic income, risk-adjusted, market-focused. It's a plan to make poor people a major profit source, meaning whoever supplies them with the means to survive will become very rich. It's the same principle as putting crushed honey comb back next to a bee hive: the bees will clean it for you.

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[account_deleted]

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Damn

[bigdavex]

We have this same stupid story recycled every week.

Re:what to do....

[MrL0G1C]

Whatever the solution, a large chunk of society won't like it because it won't fit with their capitalist ideology, unless the solution is let the economy collapse and allow most of the population to starve to death.

Re:C4

[MitchDev]

There won;t be one "Robot Repairman" created for each job lost to automation, not to mention it's a highly technical skill, so there will be MASSIVE unemployment as the automation becomes more widespread. And with college education costs sky-rocketing and beyond the reach of most, not to mention the total retraining of older workers who still need a source of income, this is nothing but a disaster in the making.

The "Star Trek" dystopia where "people only work if they want to and can do what ever they want to pursue" is NOWHERE near on the horizon....

Goobacks

[tmjva]

The obligatory South Park episode referenced here.

"They took our jawbs!"

A few modest proposals

[whitroth]

First, the company that replaces you with automation pays your unemployment until you get another job, not just for 20 weeks. If that means you're still looking when you retire, that's how many years they pay. Certainly, unemployment is *vastly* cheaper than salaries (and all you asshole libertarians that wouldn't touch it, let me tell you that a dozen years ago, I was getting the max in IL... which was about $400/wk.; before getting laid off, I'd been making a *lot* more than that).

Second, how 'bout, since stocks and dividends are *so* great... how 'bout the company, along with their taxes, signs over to the government voting shares, and pays dividends; enough of that, and we can have a reverse income tax.

THAT would solve the problem in a real long-term manner.

Now, what you'd do with all that free time, other than play video games and couch potato, is another story.

                mark

mandatory post

[gzuckier]

i for one welcome........

All your jobs

[phrackthat]

are belong to us.

Don't worry

[NewYork]

Don't worry; All unemployed will be shipped to Mars;

You cannot tell

[Baki]

Economic laws do change fundamentally, it is hard to predict. However, suppose a robot could do the 10-fold work of what most people could do. Indeed we would not run out of ideas on what to do, but if you could replace yourself, would you continue to add your 10% "output" for 10% extra income, or would you rather have 100% spare time for about 90% income? That is the trade off that will be made in the end.

As robots get more powerful compared to man, and the "pseudo-intelligece" will surpass that of most humans for most tasks, I find it really hard to see how most people would still have meaningful jobs.

It is not about imagining the output, it is about imagining what extra significant contributation most men could make in relation to robots.

Who will profit from automation

[Baki]

Suppose I could invest $50k and get a kind of robotic copy of myself. I could send that to work and do my job for me, enjoy lots of free time and the same income.

On the other hand, suppose my employer would invest these $50k....

In the end, the question is how the "spoils" of automation will be distributed about the population. Indeed that doesn't look good now.

In the future we will have more than enough production capacity to fulfull our needs and wishes, but if we use that capacity to any good, that is compete redistribution of all of it, is questionable. The current trend doesn't look good, but I think economists will see, sooner or later, that the alternative is for the rich to live in a state of siege, military protected and guarded against the masses.

The author's job is not as risk

[Optali]

They don't need to worry: The job of publishing stupid, useless and unfounded opinion pieces as studies will never be taken over by robots.

It's already started...

[iq145]

http://www.newser.com/story/19... http://www.dailydot.com/techno... http://www.newser.com/story/18... http://www.newser.com/story/20...

Professional Roofers

[movdqa]

The weather in the Northeast the past five weeks has been absolutely brutal on roofs. It's resulted in dangerous weight conditions resulting in many roof failures and ice dam issues resulting in interior leaks. The biggest problem in my area is finding professionals to get rid of ice and snow on roofs. Guys that will know how to work in dangerous conditions and not damage your property and that understand the issues that lead to roofing problems. Also guys that can deal with chunks of ice weighing hundreds of pounds and realizing that they shouldn't be breaking off ice just over a skylight or other fragile features around a home. It's also nice if they clean off all of the snow and ice around your property that came off your roof. Let me know when there's a robot that can do this.