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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

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

[JackieBrown]

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

Re:Caution: Whatsapp as business model cited in TF

[xanthines-R-yummy]

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

What do I do when robots take over my job?

[Lumpy]

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

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?

Humans Need Not Apply

[pauljlucas]

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

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

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: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.

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: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.

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.

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: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: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.

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.