Slashdot Mirror
Elon Musk Predicts Automation Will Lead To A Universal Basic Income (mashable.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Mashable's new article about Tesla/SpaceX founder Elon Musk:
Tech innovators in the self-driving car and AI industries talk a lot about how many human jobs will be innovated out of existence, but they rarely explain what will happen to all those newly jobless humans. In an interview with CNBC on Friday, Musk said that he believes the solution to taking care of human workers who are displaced by robots and software is creating a (presumably government-backed) universal basic income for all. "There's a pretty good chance we end up with a universal basic income, or something like that, due to automation," said Musk. "I'm not sure what else one would do. That's what I think would happen."
And what will this world look like? "People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things," Musk told CNBC's interviewer. "Certainly more leisure time." President Obama has also talked about "redesigning the social compact" with MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, and in August predicted the question of whether there's support for the Universal Basic Income is "a debate that we'll be having over the next 10 or 20 years."
And what will this world look like? "People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things," Musk told CNBC's interviewer. "Certainly more leisure time." President Obama has also talked about "redesigning the social compact" with MIT Media Lab director Joi Ito, and in August predicted the question of whether there's support for the Universal Basic Income is "a debate that we'll be having over the next 10 or 20 years."
Money only has value if you can exchange it for other people's work. I'm not sure if machines will accept it...
C'mon, the rich are going to insist on low taxes, companies aint paying for shit if they can get away with it - where does that leave the tax base to impliment a UBI then?
Hint - There wont be one!
Enough with the UBI bullshit, because unless you can get the tax abse to impliment it, it's a pipedream. Face it, the newly jobless will be fucked unless new industries are created and umm.... exactly where are tose jobs coming from?
Any more obvious, stolen "insights" to share with us, oh great prophet?
> People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things
And if it has value, it will be called work.
Guys, Elon Musk just invented work! What a genius.
And there isn't really any other way.
From the 1930s Keynes predicted a 15 hour working week. In the 60s and 70s a three day weekend was predicted. What actually happens is that some people have to work harder than ever for fear of losing their jobs while others have no work and live in poverty.
The test is whether Musk would be willing to pay a significantly higher corporation tax to fund the basic income.
His job is to sell you the idea of his company. In order to do that, he comes up with fanciful notions that will make you feel good so you think good things about him and his company. This is just advertising and has the same truth quotient as politicians kissing babies in front of cameras when in private, they eat babies. UBI is the socialist dream repackaged, and will fail for the same reasons Venezuela has fallen. When you give out money, it becomes less valuable. When you make it more difficult to acquire, it becomes more valuable. This value is measured in terms of what people will trade for it, not the denominations.
Alternative Right.
We have to make machine work taxable. Then we'll have the funds to cross finance a UBI or some other model.
It would also move the tipping point where machine work is more cost effective than human labor. I mean it's pretty unfair as it is. A machine designed for a specific task is usually way faster at the task and more precise than a human and on top of that, a employer usually pays taxes on an employee. Not to mention the taxes the employee himself has to pay on his salary.
Did he hack into the simulation to peek at our probable future?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
There's a history of visionaries predicting utopian scenarios including a greater share of leisure time as a result of automation. John Maynard Keynes famously predicted a 15 hour working week.
It's based on the idea that there's a certain amount of work that needs to be done, and once it's automated people have nothing to do. However, the work that really that "needs" to be done was automated away during the Agricultural Revolution in the 1700's and 1800's. 90% of the work we're doing now (and probably closer to 100% of slashdotters' work) doesn't *need* to be done, but we do it anyway.
What the visionaries don't take into account is that the top two levels of Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs don't work like the bottom two levels. The first small part of our work fulfils the basic needs like food water and shelter, then we carry on working in pursuit of higher needs, such as prestige and a sensation that we're fulfilling our potential. These needs are relative to what everyone else is accomplishing.
This is why people will carry on working long weeks long after automation takes away their manual labour jobs. In fact, automation has lead to longer working weeks, as manual labour is replaced with office work that can physically be done for longer. People will work for as long as they can to compete with their peers
Back to Elon's preiction. What will actually happen is that in the short term, people laid off as a result of automation will suffer and be angry, and in the long term the economy will adjust to the excess supply of cheap labour and invent new ways to use it, not necessarily as pleasant as the old manual jobs.
foo mane padme hum
When most of the work is automated, and therefor the opportunity for most of the people to provide for themselves is gone, there simply is no other option.
In such an environment capitalism becomes untenable because it will have become a winner takes all game on a global scale, leaving the rest with absolutely nothing. The first signs of this happening have been visible for quite a while already, it is the massive wave of consolidation going on in all industries, leaving us with bigger and bigger companies and less and less competition.
Take this to the process to logical capitalistic end, and it is obvious unmitigated capitalism will not work anymore. Something drastic will have to change in our worldview regarding the rules of ownership and fair distribution of wealth, or it will end in a bloody revolution.
UBI seems the most likely candidate. But on its own it is not enough. People will simply not accept that a very few people will own everything while they will have to live on a "handout, however generous the UBI will be. Because at that time it will not be about money and wealth alone anymore, it will also be about power and who makes the decisions.
As odd as it me seem to most americans, the (far) future may be more like communism proper, not the totalitarian version we have seen sofar, than anything else.
The automation problem will end one of two ways.
Universal basic income or related economic solution.
OR.
A lot less humans thanks to automated killing.
Grim. But option 2 is far more likely given the people that run the world.
On Tuesday, November 8, 2016 enough people voted for Hillary Clinton that she won the presidency. During her first three months of office, she implemented a UBI and raised taxes to pay for it.
Under this plan, every household in America receives $30,000 a year. The USA is able to keep borrowing on the basis of the strength of its brand, and the $28 trillion debt is not going to be a problem because the government is in fact making money from this scheme: it borrows, pays out benefits, the population grows, and it gets more taxes, so it can borrow more.
However, the problem is that since $30,000 is pegged as the entry level that people can pay, costs catch up with this rate. Apartments that were once $500 a month are now $800 per month. Food prices go up as well. As a result, to live comfortably, you need about $40,000 per household minimum per year.
In 2020, the people will vote again. Whoever promises $40,000 a year in UBI will win, even though this is obviously a financial disaster for government as spending will have outpaced the borrow-spend-tax scheme.
Another problem has reared its head. Because America is now giving out free money, people are flooding across the borders. This means that government will need to pay more, to more people, just in order to keep this program going.
Parallels to Obamacare are mentioned for the first time.
Others point to the failure of European socialism. Yes, yes, there are all these great benefits... but we have to constantly bring in new people to work and be taxed to pay for the previous generation, which means that if population rises, the government goes bankrupt. The same problem afflicts the USA as it considers how to pay for the Millennials, the second-biggest generation ever.
Gift-giving programs like this always turn into runaway spirals.
Alternative Right.
"People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things,"... Nope, very few people will have the motivation to do such things because they are aware that there is something somewhere that soon will do these things better than them.
The human living will leave any senses except for very few people.
Let me put forth a simple challenge: based on the budget data of 2015 for your own country, show where the money is going to come from.
The final equation should show this: (number of recipients) * (yearly sum paid) = (total income state) - (other expenditures state)
Show the following ***numbers*** (i.e. no handwaving):
- Number of recipients: this is either the total number of adults, or the total number of people (i.e. adults and children). Tell us how many there are.
- Yearly sum paid: this is what each recipient gets paid every year. How much will this be? What is considered a reasonable amount to live on in your country?
- Total income state: this is how much money the state drags in every year. This is usually only taxes but sometimes also include things like oil sales. Show what tax pressure looks like for the average person. If you plan to tax people who receive _only_ UBI, show how much they have left to live on after taxes.
- Other expenditures state: this includes such things as education, healthcare, having an army, building roads, etc. This figure should pretty much be the same as it is today.
Most of these discussions end with a bit of handwaving and a vague statement like "oh, the other 2 trillion will come out of improved efficiency", which is plainly ridiculous (it's more than the whole nation spends on salaries combined). This makes me suspect the proponents of UBI have not actually sat down and done the math, despite this being fairly straightforward.
If you do these things you will quickly find that either UBI will be far, far too small to live on, or that there is a very significant shortfal on the income side.
UBI may be a great idea. We have lots of great ideas, as a species, but unfortunately not all of those ideas can be realistically realized.
I am glad someone said this. I first read it in Houellebecq's Whatever, and was shocked by how flagrantly true it is. Most of what we do now is shuffling the desk chairs on the Titanic, hoping people will keep the money machine going.
A slightly more nuanced view: whatever everyone has becomes mediocre, partially from our pretense and partially because the wider the appeal of any given thing, the less quality is invested in it. People are working to rise above the Herd because the Herd converts everything it touches into mediocre variants of the original.
Alternative Right.
introduction of mandatory population culling.
Or you could believe that you'll have your own pet robot, a flying car and money to live on.
I'm a great supporter of UBI and would love this to happen. I don't think it will though.
Automation has been happening for well over a century; probably back to Marc Brunel's Pulley Block production line in the 1800's. Robots improved this but we never replaced all workers at the same time. The closest we got was during the industrial revolution.
So there's no immediate need for this. Society will adapt at the same rate that automation does, and we'll have a lot of largely acceptable compromises rather than a solid solution that lots of people strongly oppose.
It is inevitable, unless we as a species decide to kill off (actively or by inaction) those who will no longer be able to find jobs to survive.
The question is how long it will take and how much suffering will have to be endured due to resistance and challenges along the way.
The automation trend will not stop. We will increase in numbers. There will simply not be enough jobs (full or part time) for everyone with the need, sooner or later.
Unless we kill people, or just let them die, we will collectively have to sustain ourselves. Whether we do that via complex and overhead-ridden social security systems, or simplify matters greatly and institute a universal basic income is the question. Being a pragmatic, the latter seems to be the far better option.
I say all of this from a position of relative safety, having a fairly well-paying job which will not be automated away anytime soon and also having enough money in the bank to last me for 10+ years should I need it.
In other words: I am currently in a position where I would not be receiving any UBI, since my income is large enough to offset it all and still have me pay taxes. I care about the whole species. Call me naive...
Things are getting creepy in general because our civilization is collapsing, and when that happens, only untruths are tolerated which means that almost everything is a lie.
We have not only homegrown dysgenics (Idiocracy style) but the effects of a consumer population bent on pleasure (Brave New World style) combined with a constant third-world influx so that we may virtue signal our way to social success (see Camp of the Saints).
The result is that there is no way for this society to survive. The babbling over the UBI is just a way of keeping the groundlings fascinated and thus distracted while the kleptocracy takes anything of value that is left before the edifice falls.
Alternative Right.
Automation with some form of AI means sensors and lots of hot electronics.
My friends are going to love all this. They already make a lot of money out of fixing smart homes. (you see the sensors and parts are constantly malfunctioning)
All this stuff is great but so far all it does is churn through existing industries and open up new ones.
More jobs for the 'pool guy' only this time it will be to detach a robot from your roof that was supposed to clean the tiles.
Of course for this level of automation to become ubiquitous then it needs to go through commodification (like smart phones did) to reach prices that the poor can afford. Which also means increasing levels of obsolescence or unreliability.
The real question will be if the industries that need humans plus augmentation from robotics/simple AI are profitable for the private market or whether they will need the government to perform the work. Eg: global warming requires a lot of jobs to be created to offset the many problems with agriculture, reforestation, protection of the biosphere, design of cities etc.
As for universal income a job guarantee is a superior form of universal income.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMshp0-odH0&feature=youtu.be
https://medium.com/modern-money-matters/how-the-job-guarantee-debunks-mainstream-economics-31b25af1ea67#.1oncwtmme
http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=34448
*keeps a buffer stock of employed people who maintain their skills or develop new ones on the job rather than sit idle.
*controls inflation and deflation with granularity, minus all the made up economics that justify having unemployment which is empirically debunked.
*costs less overall eg: ramifications of idle humans means drug abuse, social problems, anxiety, crime etc.
*provides a domain constraint to fix problems with free market solutions. Eg: the dis-proven idea that 'free markets' can somehow provide employment for everyone and have some form of equilibrium (long since proven false). Or optimise anything beyond short term profit.
send 1200 usd to every AC every month.
I disagree with your vision of history which seems to favor the Leftist point of view. In fact, as in pre-Revolutionary France, improvements in society led to the poor having more children, which then caused them to be starving as they had reproduced past carrying capacity. At that point, they revolted and in so doing, made their situation worse.
Alternative Right.
Seeing as none of them have actually created any of this technology that's going to give us all so much free time...
No, the ruling classes won't hand out cash to people who need it. It'll be more likely Aids v2 will be launched.
From the 1930s Keynes predicted a 15 hour working week. In the 60s and 70s a three day weekend was predicted. What actually happens is that some people have to work harder than ever for fear of losing their jobs while others have no work and live in poverty.
And a third group don't work yet live in fantastic luxury because they own everything. If we had Keyne's vision of capitalism, we would all be working 15 hour weeks, but we don't have that, we basically have a regression to feudalism. Those that own the land/capital grant a share of the harvest surplus to those who still have some utility value to the feudal lords. Those that are not useful live off the charity of those who still are - in the end what do the feudal lords care if the stupid serfs want to share their meagre income among themselves.
We had a UBI in the 1960-80 when the middle class was big enough to self insure itself (universal healthcare, unemployment, pensions). Unless you fix the structural shift that has occurred since then, any new attempts at a UBI simply amount to the poor sharing rocks and imaging they are potatoes.
And the MBA wizards and bean-counters will calculate the 'proper' percentages of the UBI that will be spent for food, shelter, energy, clothing, transportation, and such. They will then calculate exactly how much they can price any items classified as 'extra' - non necessities, and begin the process of extracting the maximum amount of profit from the proles. A UBI will provde leisure tme, but the time is useless without some expendable income in a capitalist socieity. ...), internet for research...
Time to become an artist is useless if you cannot afford paints, paper, canvas, pastels, chalk, etc...
Time to do wood working is useless if you cannot afford tools, wood, glues, screws, extra power...
Time to write a book/novel/essay is useless if you cannot afford the pencils, paper, (or word processor, printer ink, printer,
Same for electronics ( Arduino is my particular weakness ), gardening, animal husbandry, etc....
Then there is the cost of medical treatment, equipment, support personnel...
In short, a UBI that does not include health care wll impoverish the proles ( Obamacare is already doing this ).
The philosophy of designed obsolesence of goods needs to be dropped. THINGS must be repairable, be designed to last and last.
A UBI will force a bitch of a change in the health industry, auto industry, internet/entertainment/music/movie ( the internet needs to be a utility. ), clothing indusry,
education industry ( yes, it is an industry - Universities run a business model, and students/student debt are its products )...
And both of the major politiical partes are in it up to their gills or noses. Depends on who bought them.
It will be a major cluster for about three generations, or two revolutions ( cannot get it right the first time, have to redo it...), whatever comes first.
Enough bogus Musk stories already. What next, a non-story about how you can now get a glass roof for your Tesla?
Oh wait...
I have been saying that for about ten years. Seems he also took an idea of mine to make holographic roof tiles to hide solar panels from the street perspective..
check roboeconomy.com
Post industrial, automation driven civilization is the bread. :)
YOU are yeast.
The oven is preheated and proofing time is just about up.
..."People will have time to do other things, more complex things, more interesting things,"...
Really? Go ask those living under the current welfare state how "complex" and "interesting" their lives are based on a government-funded paycheck.
UBI will be nothing more than the current welfare program expanded. And if you think for a second any government will financially approve any more than BASIC bread-and-cheese income, you're delusional. This cannot and will not happen without a massive overhaul of unadulterated greed that has created the 1% elite class who care about themselves, not funding millions of humans to enjoy an "interesting" life sitting on their ass no matter how much self-education and groupthink may advance the human race. Greed always wins. Look at history.
At first, there may be some kind of pay scale to reward those with advanced degrees and careers (lawyers, doctors, etc.) as they're put out to pasture by automation. But once we realize that automation and AI have made educating a human an extinct concept, all humans will be pretty much treated the same way financially, for there will literally be no valid reason to reward one above the other.
Forget defeating unadulterated greed for a moment, an equally delusional concept is thinking that governments can afford to pay humans to have a complex and interesting life. Much like trying to extract taxes out of the wealthy, lobbyists and loopholes serving the elite class will ensure they take on the smallest burden possible, which translates to minimal funding for the UBI concept.
TL; DR - Either figure out another way to pay for it, or call a spade a spade, and drop the delusional dreamspeak.
Popular revolutions are almost always led by elites. Remember the archetype of them all, the Magna Carta?
Alternative Right.
Why would the people who own the resources want to give them away?
predicts automation will lead to a universal basic income, And lots of programmers, and robot repairmen, and marketing consultants, and lawyers, and judges?
Bahubali 2 the conclusion trailer released
watch it here..
https://youtu.be/-qvz0fAZwBQ
Why is absolutely everything Elon "Twat Twatty Twattish" Musk news? Yes, automation may lead to universal basic income, alongside advanced 3d printing and so on. We know that. We've known it for a while. Why do we give a flying fuck that Elon Musk thinks it as well?
Not surprising that a corporate welfare queen like Musk thinks it's fine and dandy for everyone to get money for doing fuck-all.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The biggest problem society will face will not be finding something to eat - it will be finding something to DO. "Idle hands make for mischief".
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Sauron was the good guy. The elves were racists bastards that would rather leave Middle Earth than see their leader's daughter marry a dirty human. The dwarves were just as bad. Not even the humans got along with the humans.
Meanwhile, Sauron ruled a multicultural group of diverse individuals that worked well tighter, goblins, orcs, trolls, humans, spiders, etc. And all they wanted was to not be oppressed by the evil racists humans and elves. They were just trying to improve their lives and move from the volcanic wasteland that was Mordor to a better place where they could farm in peace.
Sauron was the great hope of the oppressed and downtrodden.
> call a spade a spade
As a tool, I much prefer the guillotine. More complex, yes, but it does a much cleaner job.
You'll need more throughput to offset the initial cost, though.
UBI means a relatively small 'elite' which has a paid job and can afford a relatively decent level of life, plus a majority of population having 'survival benefits' which are only sufficient for basic (and bad) food, simple shelter and TV/Internet subscription with ads. Higher-level services like health care, education, hobby, travel, etc will become too expensive to compensate for near-zero profit margins.
The complete naivete of the slahdot crowd concerning UBI is beyond comprehension.
It looks like most slahdotters think a simple tinkering with the taxation system (which will mostly affect wealthy corporations and individuals) will bring universal joy to everyone.
I tell you what. It will absolutely do no good. It looks like everyone thinks that wealthy men keep their wealth in some kind of vault like Smaug. This is not the case. Most of their wealth is already in the economy, there is basically nothing you can get from the wealthy by taxing them more.
At best UBI will create a society similar to the one in Atlas Shrugged. I do not like to live in such society.
So, what is the solution to the problems UBI is supposed to cure? Most probably the answer is WAR. Currently, nobody dares to comprehend this possibility.
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
Is Elon Musk worried about his job? No? Then this is really about the concentration of wealth into ever fewer hands. The technology is just a smokescreen.
President Obama has also talked about "redesigning the social compact"
I'm pretty sure that it's "social contract"
Nah, people can always buy more robots to consume more goods and services for them. ( I forget the title of that one.)
Just another rider on the purple wage. (Brave New World meets The Great Society.)
"our civilization is collapsing"
This dire opinion is only true if you ignore the history if the US in it's entirety. People complain that some how the US has declined as if the US achieved some model society.
The US has been fighting in one war or another since the inception of the state.
The US suffered through a civil war that tore the country apart. During this war Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and jailed journalist who were publishing news he determined were fanning the north-south hate. Still he is remembered as one of the US's best Presidents.
FDR violated several US laws prior to it's entry into WW2. The lend-lease act was a blatant end run around the Neutrality Act. An act that was widely support by the US citizens. He wanted to wire tap suspected German agents in the US but Congress passed a law to prevent him from doing so. He ignored that law and did it any how. If the US had lost the world, and he had not died before the end, would most likely have faced impeachment proceedings. In hindsight his actions setup the US to go from a mediocre international player to the strongest country on the planet. Still he is remembered as one of the US's best and only 5th term President.
The turn of the century saw true monopolies that have no comparison to any company today.
The Constitution's "all men are created equal" was never really implemented but that goal is still being pursued.
In the 1980's it was common thinking that Japan was going to over take the US economically forcing a decline in US manufacturing jobs. And while Japan made great strides they didn't over take the US in anything.
The US suffered through the Great Depression were up to 50% of the people were unemployed and people were living in shanty towns in NYC park and bread lines were a common sight throughout the country.
These are just a few examples of US history that don't make the US look like a perfect society that we are some how declining from.
So if you feel the need to complain about the decline of the US you need to take in to account the totality of it's existence. To do other wise creates a picture that is misleading and self defeating.
Commie bullshit !!
I do not want your cheap brainburning drugs. They are useless for work. And I am a working man today.
Although living with Katniss wouldn't be too bad.
So future election cycles will be about who promises the most for those stuck on basic income. As a significant number of people end up on it, and assuming it's set at a level beneath what people actually need, then people's votes are easily won. Oh, they can top up their basic incomes with part time work? Yes, nice in theory, but they're trying to get money off of other people on basic income. Initially it will be okay though, there will be enough employed to pay for these services and items, but as more people migrate to BI...
There is a trash sci-fi novel called Beggars and Choosers which is set in a future world where most people exist in a world where full social welfare is provided, elections are a sham of who promises the most stuff to the populace (in return for not harrassing the upper classes), and the upper classes exist in cities free from the masses enjoying the best of everything (whilst also descending into various forms of debauchery). I presume the basic incomers were pushed out of cities via housing affordability mechanisms beforehand.
has it already said, for those who to watch.
http://requiemfortheamericandr...
Don't be frightened.
We've been hearing this since the industrial revolution. That automation means workers earn more and have more free time. But this relies on their boss passing the profits from automation onto those employees. When in reality it just means they can fire some of those employees.
Ok, so I guess he's right about having more leisure time.
some level of minimum wage is still needed or more labor laws so a place can't get away with unfair wage deductions to get free work out of people.
lower full time to 32 hours a week and set salary min level to 75K+COL or more. To start
By lowering the full time levels we can get more people working.
universal basic income. Those that have will not be privy to give to those who haven't. If they did the UBI would follow the path of minimum wage and you'll see it stagnate for years much like the minimum wage. Big shots who have all the cash will scoff at the notion of decreasing their share more to increase everyone elses and will flood politicians with campaign money to keep it from happening. The masses will be kept in place by privatized security forces who will be paid and armed better then the masses.
I do hope I'm wrong though but yeah.
cheaper then jail / prison that some use for there needs at a much higher cost.
$31,286 or more per inmate vs just giving people UBI
@emusk have a good point now!
Work gives one a sense of pride in accomplishment and soaks up our time. It is a social activity that matures us through forced interaction with many other different people. It gives a sense of belonging and inclusion. It stabilizes us. And when did a "basic income" afford anyone the means to enjoy life, to do "other things?" Will we all go deep sea fishing? How about taking up flying? Travel the world? No, more likely we will end up eating biscuits of indeterminable composition and sitting in our tin-roofed hovels in our burlap sacks. It takes much more than merely food and shelter and clothing to satisfy the broad human motivation array, and a basic income will not allow that. Thus, there will be massive discontent and violence. Not to be religious, but how long have we known that "idle hands are the devil's workshop."
E Proelio Veritas.
The Oligarchs only want what is best for you. The Oligarchs will provide for you. Trust the Oligarchs.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
As robots and printers etc make manual labor mostly useless, information will get more and more value, as it will be the thing you input into the machines to make the life of everyone better, and as such, science probably will became some sort of gold rush, with everyone too uncreative to come up with designs or media becoming "scientists".
Where are we going to get all the required energy?
Then why can't the worker become an investor by using a portion of wages to slowly accumulate stock?
A "universal" income....EXCEPT for politicians, the "uber" rich. In other words a Tyranny. The way of controlling people even more. You will only be able to have "so much" regardless of your labor. Work your ass off, or, be completely lazy, you make the same amount. That causes stagnation, lack of innovation. I'm just glad that I'm upper middle age, and by the time that happens, I'll be long gone from this world! I do not want to live in a society, where I do not have the freedom to do as I please with my labor.
So the fundamental issue we're having is that wages are not tied to ownership of productive resources. Programs like UBI presume to deal with this by taxing production.
What if, instead, wages must be part cash and part ownership? Something like a "minimum ownership wage".
"There are a dozen opinions on a matter until you know the truth. Then there is only one." - CS Lewis (paraprhase)
The reason people living under the current welfare state don't like it is once you get there, it's near impossible to get out. By law, you cannot make any sufficient amount of money, else you are immediately booted off. If you get booted off, you have nothing but the new income you make, so it better be a damn good income source. For 99% of people on welfare, this is not an option. Furthermore, another reason people don't feel good about welfare is you have a huge draconian government infrastructure which sits there and monitors you to make sure you never get out of that cycle. This is not what UBI pitches.
UBI says, and correct me if I'm wrong, if you want to go out and make more money on your own, no problem. There will be NO huge government infrastructure monitoring you. There will be NO laws which prohibit you from making a certain amount of income. Nothing. For people motivated, UBI will not get in the way.
I would guess we kind of have UBI already for people who recently arrived here (ahem immigrants) and are collecting welfare / college aid / free medical with little oversight (aka, California). Those people hold jobs while on welfare and they seem not only pretty happy about it, but they also contribute to society as well.
You know, I used to lean towards a hard core conservative, independent, Reagan style of politics. Then I found out that anyone can have things happen to them that is out of their control and the next day they can be at the bottom. Everyone will need support one time or another from someone else. Everyone. Might as well have it as UBI and well mananged.
Automation will only lead to lots of poor people without a job and income and corporations making more profit. What makes people think that the reduction of costs by automation is going to lead to the money made from it somehow piped into giving people a basic income ? Corporations avoid paying taxes like the plague by any means they can and this is not going to change. So how are governments going to get the money to pay for a universal income ?
Economist keynes predicted that people would have to work less and less once work got more automated. Never happened.
THE UBI portion of you income would have to be extremely highly regulated on what the UBI is spent on by the average person.
Otherwise what is to prevent Joe Schmoe from blowing his 24K UBI on non necessities such as smokes, beer, lottery tickets, pizza rolls, etc?
Then Joe is still out the basic necessities of life like shelter, clothing and sustainable food and no better off than he was before now with the difference being the Mr Hard Worker's tax money is paying for Joe to be a leech.
I don't think that we should abandon the principles of capitalism at the slightest whiff of inequity. I think it is far too short-sighted to expect that everyone have wage income. There is a thriving passive non-wage income economy and we need to get more in touch with it. This way, we don't need traditional jobs per se, but we don't have to directly subsidise people's incomes either. What we do need is better education about passive income and passive income resources.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
Only /. would highly mod a post saying that we should all just kill each other rather than mess around with the tax system. . . because *incoherent economic argument that would make their Eco 101 professor spin in grave*
/. now consists of the ape shit crazy, Trump supporting, conspiracy theory toting, Nihilist types. The reason for this being. . . those types tend to scare the rest of us away. . .
I think the primary demographic of
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Yes indeed. I saw a wooden barrel with a price tag of 2,200 euro. And that price was because it was 'defect' (not water proof). The wooden barrels that can still contain beer or wine costs tens of thousands of euro.
There appears to be some arbitrage opportunities here, Used wine barrels start at about $100 (95ish euro) on Amazon.
That Elon Musk lacks the foresight to make predictions. Premature foregone conclusion much? Must be nice in the little bubble he calls his reality.
The point of the UBI is that no one should need to work if they don't want to. It is equivalent to giving all people a minimum wage job that involves doing nothing useful.
If companies want to hire volunteers to work for free, that's fine. If they want to pay a small amount per hour, that's fine too, because the people are already being paid sufficiently for that work through the UBI.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
If there's a Universal Basic Income, then the minimum wage needs to be abolished, because people are already effectively getting their minimum wage through the UBI.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
To pay for UBI, you need a robust economy in the US.
This requires that the cost of US workers be competitive with folks from developing countries.
A higher minimum wage is the reverse of this.
But the current minimum wage does not provide a standard of living that US workers are accustomed to.
So maybe instead of increasing minimum wage and separately providing free money,
why not couple them?
Lower minimum wage, but supplement it to make it higher.
Maybe couple that with incentives to capital to invest here instead of following Walmart or Apple.
Or perhaps modify dis-incentives which have probably pushed the balance between capital and labor a bit too far.
Mr. Musk appears to be already heading these directions with solar industry.
We need to figure out what it would take to get Apple to do more supply chain things here.
The big question is what happens between a significant number of people losing their jobs and UBI arriving? And how long is that period? At the moment you have a pool of people who are mainly looking for work - the overall number stays roughly the same but there is probably a lot of turnover as people move in and out of that pool. At some point this pool is going to start to actually grow - people will move in and won't be able to move out. This is already happening to an extent in the UK but the numbers can be masked by the number of people sharing a dwindling number of shitty jobs eg they are working part-time or zero-hour contracts. When they go from 'surviving' to 'homeless' the shit will hit the fan.
One of the very rare occasions I wish I was not an AC. Both thumbs up and I am leaning back in my chair trying to extend my big toes too.. I'd give you one more appendage up but I am getting to an age where that's less reliable.
As long they don't say up front we pay and then on pay day say you own us X so your pay is 0.
Have gnu, will travel.
Musk's business models are largely based on government subsidies, government regulation, government-created barriers to entry, Naturally, he wants most of the population to become dependent on government.
If we have displaced workers as a result of automation then we are facing an overpopulation crisis and need to institute policy accordingly to drop the surplus population.
That's what this so-called 'UBI' would create. Hello 'Idiocracy', goodbye 'American know-how and innovation' -- and, guaranteed, those of us who can and do work, will end up paying taxes so high that we can't afford to live anymore, to pay for it all. You want a Civil War? Go ahead and institute UBI.
Count me among them. One of my jobs is to eliminate dangerous and tedious work from manufacturing processes. Nobody wants to spend their day grabbing searing hot parts from a welder at one station and stacking them in exact locations after another so they don't get out of order and miss their settling time. That's where robots come in.
People are needed to maintain those robots and the computers they coordinate with. People are also needed to supply the machines with materials. There will always be work to do. There will just be better options than "something to pay the bills for now".
In a world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king--and the two-eyed man is a heretic.
It's called a ROBOT TAX.
Then the robot owners just reclassify the robots as independent contractors and it all falls apart.
The only way this can be made to work is if the government owns the robots and pays dividends to its citizens.
But this is America, so if you don't have the capital to own robots (or land), you have the FREEDOM to starve in the gutter. That's why our system is teh BEST.
Puritan Alert! Work is a necessary evil, little more.
Work for pay, is basically by definition, doing something you would rather not to get resources to do what you want.
There are endless activities to soak up your time and give you satisfaction. Yes, some of them are difficult and require investments of time, energy, and other resources. Lots of people will do them, even if not paid. Clear example: Open Source.
kleptocracy takes anything of value that is left before the edifice falls.
I've always wondered about what happens next. Will the kleptocrats all move to another country, one with working utilities, hospitals, etc? Or do they go down the drain with everyone else, and hope their gates aren't overrun with the starving mob?
lower full time to 32 hours a week and set salary min level to 75K+COL or more. To start
To start what? Insane inflation? That's a rather large chasm between current minimum wage and a $75K salary floor. That might require forcing companies to stop paying CEOs 5,000% more than their employees, along with eliminating golden parachutes and other forms of forced retirement "penalties" measured in tens of millions. Fat fucking chance of that happening.
By lowering the full time levels we can get more people working.
Ah, let's pay everyone an exorbitant salary and put more people in the workforce. No way that would increase burden for companies well beyond revenue or sustainability...
We have not only homegrown dysgenics (Idiocracy style)
Citation needed. And no, a shitty movie is not a citation.
Countercitation: flynn effect
I would suggest that if the social order is on the verge of collapse, it's because our current social order was designed by morons who were quantifiably dumber and less informed than future generations are.
Until the next morning, when some fickle people, completely eschewing personal responsibility for their own personal choices start complaining... then the SJW's hear about it... then what was actually consensual turns into "rape"... then the cops arrive... then the courts screw you... then you're on the Sexual Offender's List and your life is ruined.
No shit. Just like that.
Here's what's right, ladies and gentlemen: You get drunk or drugged or simply really enthused? That state is your responsibility except in the extremely unlikely event the drink or drugs got into your system via force or deception. You are responsible both for your choices, and the consequences of those choices.
It is not another person's responsibility to read your drunk or drugged or enthused mind and try to figure out if you're making a decision you will back up or not. It's your responsibility to see to it that you make decisions you can live with. (The obvious smart thing is not to get drunk or drugged in the first place, but smart rarely seems to be in play here)
Even in the (very unlikely) case where force or deception was involved in getting you into a particular state of mind, the responsibility for non-consensuality in any guise is that of the person who was responsible for the forcing or the deception. Who could easily not be the person, or be in league with the person, who went a-romping with/on your happy-parts. If it isn't — then the romper is not a rapist and should not be regarded as one. If you do regard them as one under those circumstances, then all you've done is create another victim. Only now you are the victimizer.
Unfortunately society has shit itself and fallen in it on these issues; personal responsibility is something no SJW understands, or wants to understand.
The end game if the SJWs keep control of this issue is definitely going to be non-conscious sex robots. This is because they will be the only partners that you will be able to count on not to call consensual acts rape. Because rape can't apply to an object. I hope, anyway. There would be a lot of raped socks, bananas and cucumbers out there if so, not to mention some extremely offended bottles of lube, so probably not.
Just remember, fellas, she changes her mind, you're going be fucked in a way you really, really won't like. Forever, the way most of the laws are now. Because legislators just can't go wrong "getting tough on Sexual Offenders" and they make it a regular part of their sausage-making.
This. A thousand times this.
It won't be UBI that kills the nation. It'll be selfish "I hadda do X so you do too" morons, assisted by the "Arbeit macht frei" morons and the "work is a required pursuit to be of human worth" morons.
The transition from a work-for-survival economy to a pursue-your-dreams economy is likely to be very, very difficult.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
See, what you don't realize is that's just a blue cup which is receding from you really, really fast.
(Political metaphor absolutely intended)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Good luck boys!
Curso NR 10 online curso NR 10 curso NR 10 online
UBI will happen right about the time we convince corporations and the rich to give up their power and status and be just normal people.
How are you going to convince someone to work at McDonalds or out in the fields picking strawberries if you have UBI? Shit jobs depend on people having no better options.
I read the internet for the articles.
Then why can't the worker become an investor by using a portion of wages to slowly accumulate stock?
Why can't the poor become rich by just winning big at slots?
How do you propose a revolution when they are holed up in "lavish bunkers" and guarded by drones with guns?
Society is evolving, not collapsing. In better parts of the world life has never been so good.
Flynn Effect
Your mistake is in conflating "human effort" with "Income."
History is replete with individuals who did valuable, and/or worthy, and/or artistic, things because that was what they wanted to do, and not because someone was paying them (and in many cases, no one was paying them.)
I write SDR software. It's pretty good -- in fact, a lot of my users say it's the best in the world. Guess what I get paid for doing that? Nothing. Zip. Nada. I do it because I like doing it. And, of course, because I can do it. In my case, it's because I've done some other things that got me the financial wherewithal to do what I want, instead of what I had to. But I assure you, if I'd been able to do my own thing sooner, I would have done so.
Frankly, if the only thing motivating someone to do something is money, they could be doing something better. Also, there is a distinct possibility that the job isn't being done as well as it could be.
We should get away -- entirely -- from the idea that human worth is tied to constant wage slavery.
Here's something else;
Used to be we swept the floor. Someone had to do it, right? Then along came the vacuum cleaner, some time was saved, and the brooms got put away. Then along came Roomba, almost the entire tasl now requires no attention, and the vacuum cleaner got put away. What was lost? Not a damn thing. What was gained? The freedom to do do whatever you wanted while your floor got vacuumed. All that's left is emptying the Roomba's collected grit and grime; and how long do you suppose it'll be before the hardware doing the job can do that too? And again, what is lost? Nothing.
Labor-saving devices most critical value is that of relieving us of drudgery. Not that of freeing us to do other drudgery.
That's what everyone has to wrap their head around.
If I don't have to drive, mostly, I won't. If I don't have to vacuum the floor, I won't (and I do, in fact, own and appreciate a Roomba. I clean it once a day, takes about thirty seconds.) If I don't have to clean the catbox, I won't. Go shopping. Take out the garbage. Wash my clothes. Mow the lawn. And so on. And yes, that absolutely includes working for a wage -- when machines can do it, they should do it. It's not a bad thing. It's a wonderful thing.
We're a long way from this, but it is exactly where we should be trying to head. Money isn't a good thing. Money is what is holding our society in its current, stressed, divisively classed form.
It's going be very rough getting from here to there. I can't say I feel very good about watching the process, but the game is very much worth the candle. Let's not hang on to drudgery. Let's reach for freedom to do whatever we want.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Player Piano for the record.
-Vonnegut
"This dire opinion is only true if you ignore the history if the US in it's entirety"
Can I ignore that useless apostrophe? It's means it is.
Social Security payments should be unaffected by part-time work, (which could well be the most common type of work in the future as jobs diminish), letting taxation recoup the money when income reaches a high enough level. this should provide a very smooth transition to cope with the changing work dynamics of the future.
... receiving public medical aid and money without end? Yeah. I'm urethane this story has a happy ending...
The same large companies now screaming bloody murder about raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour are going welcome a Universal Basic Income with open arms.
My prediction: 1% (the owning class) living in luxury, 20% (the making and repairing class) living in comfort, 80% (the permanently unemployable) living in near-starvation.
The current wave of automation shows no signs of ending, so we shall see what happens.
So, basically, going back to depression-era living, where everyone lives off of government rations.
Talk about progress!
Then you'll have to ignore the "if" where there should be "of", and it'll all go to hell in a handbasin.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I could see automation creating a surplus of basic goods that could be directly provided, but not UBI.
France tried that. It was disastrous.
You're right. No one should complain about something declining, until it has declined past its lowest point ever. See also, "there are starving children in Africa, therefore you have no right to complain about anything".
Goit.
But you'd have to give *all* people that amount to save *some* people from going to jail. Most poor people aren't in jail, and some still will be if you give them money.
Nothing will change
Millions, then Billions will be out of work
Eventually, labor will become so cheap that the 1% need no longer concern themselves with the 99%
The current system of support will be eliminated, the 99% will experience shorter lives, with more desperation
Girls will work the street and men will break laws to buy subsistence
Police will be increased, killings will multiply, finally biowar will be used to eliminate much of the 99% threat.
NEVER count on the long term thinking of the 1% as being altruistic
Equality has to be taken by force.
And it won't happen in this perfect information world.
Curso NR 10 online curso NR 10 curso NR 10 online
There are more people employed today than at any other time in history. Unless you know someone who makes hand-dipped candles for a living, every worker you know has a job made possible by modern technologies.
The Luddites who feared their jobs in the textile industry would be replaced by machines benefited as much as anyone, as textiles became far more affordable. For the first time in history, millions of people could afford to wear more than rags.
Time and time again, we've seen that moderately disruptive technologies have had a moderate net positive effect on the number of jobs available, and massively disruptive new technologies have had a massive net positive effect on the number of jobs available. 21st-century technologies will be no exception.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
The idea is that you rejig both taxes and ubi do that for example net income for a median tax earner doesn't change.
Their net income won't change, but their motivation to create goods or services that benefit society will certainly change, when they look around and observe that people who do absolutely no work are now receiving a "basic" income that their hardworking grandparents would have envied.
That seems to be a major flaw that UBI supporters overlook.
Under UBI, a highly-paid person would probably find enough motivation to keep doing what they're doing, but think about a sanitation worker. He could stop the hard work of tossing smelly bags of garbage into trucks, and earn nearly the same income as he currently does. Under UBI, wages for those types of jobs would have to massively increase, just to keep people on the job.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
my salary gets replaced by $120,000
So under UBI, if you tune out and do no work, your family will have more income than the current scenario where you are engaged in a job through which you contribute valuable services to society.
That would be great for your family, but bad for society. And if millions of people decide to stop creating goods and services, suddenly there's a massive shortage of them.
If there's an incentive for a software developer to stop working, the incentive is that much greater for a low-skilled person, such a sanitation worker, to stop working. Garbage will pile up in the streets.
After you think it through, you realize UBI is unworkable.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
We *should* be approaching a 15 hour workweek by now. The historical trend is for the workweek to get shorter and shorter. But this trend got stuck. Employees who would really like to work, say, 18 hours per week, refrain from doing so for lots of reasons. Maybe they would lose benefits; maybe they fear a stigma of being perceived as lazy; maybe their employer isn't equipped to create nontraditional working arrangements.
As a 40-hour-per-week employee (what is currently arbitrarily considered a "full time" worker), I contribute to the cost of my health insurance, and my employer makes an even bigger contribution. That's a trap. Just increase my hourly wage by the amount of the employer contribution, and have me pay the entire cost of the health insurance.
But if the work that needs to be done could be divvied up between more employees, working blissfully short workweeks, you would (1) have a surge in the number of employed people, (2) eliminate the need to import H-1B workers, and (3) create far more social benefits than a UBI would.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
in the long term the economy will adjust to the excess supply of cheap labour and invent new ways to use it, not necessarily as pleasant as the old manual jobs.
That is why there are currently more people employed than at any time in human history. Thanks to modern technologies, entire new classes of jobs have come into existence, and they certainly are more pleasant than the old manual jobs (such as harvesting grain with a scythe, or digging coal out of the ground with hand tools).
But that trend would be wrecked by a UBI. There won't be an excess supply of cheap labor, when a UBI pays people to do nothing.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Technology is the root of all that you mention, and it would have advanced anyway. We have wasted what it has given us on make-work jobs and useless activities which, whether your wife likes them or not, create bloat in this society. It might be time to realize that what you want is not the yardstick.
Alternative Right.
So what is your solution?
If you feel giving pedicures is a make-work job, would you want an across-the-board reduction in disposable income so that fewer people can afford pedicures (as was the case 50 years ago)?
Or would you simply ban pedicures?
And what would you do with those who were formerly employed giving pedicures? Do you have a more meaningful job lined up for them? Would you have them do nothing and simply receive UBI? (It's not even clear whether you are pro- or anti-UBI.)
With some exceptions, a job should be considered a make-work job only if it can't sustainably exist in a free market without government subsidies. By that definition, pedicurists do not have make-work jobs.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.