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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."
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.
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
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.
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.
I did do the research about a year ago, but I don't have all the numbers at hand anymore.
UBI of $2000/month per adult, $800/month per child, flat tax of about 45-50% on all income, pretty much no deductions, no taxes on capital gains or interest/dividend income (but no deduction on interest/dividend payments or capital losses), elimination of gift/estate taxes, a VAT of about 25%, instead of deducting charitable contributions the organization gets a percentage of all contributions in additional funds directly from the government, eliminate welfare/SNAP, eliminate minimum wage. Single-payer universal healthcare would be available.
If we want to continue to subsidize certain things like home loan interest, they'd be direct reductions in the interest rate rather than deductions from your taxable income. All income, except the UBI itself, would be subject to the flat tax, paid directly by the employer.
Corporate taxes would be at the same rate as the personal income tax rate, with only direct costs deductible (not business lunches or advertising or corporate jets except to the extent they can be shown to actually save money over alternative transportation). This is where capital gains and dividend payments are taxed. Depreciation of actual working assets would be allowed as ongoing expenses as long as any resale of those assets is counted as income.
The income tax (personal and corporate) would be automatically set to provide 50% of the annual budget needs, while the VAT would provide the other 50% (based on the previous two-year period's numbers or similar).
Most individuals would never need to file a tax return. Payments would all be electronic to save on costs to administer.
Eliminating capital gains and dividend income is reasonable because you're collecting the taxes through a different route - and basing the country's budget and economy on the vagaries of the stock market is insane. Taxing everything at the source eliminates most ways of avoiding taxes. If a business is paying someone under the table to avoid taxes, they are just going to be paying a higher tax themselves since those payments won't be legitimate business expenses. Etc.
Yeah, living on $24000/year for a single person might not be great, but it would give people the freedom to move to places where prices are lower without worrying about whether there will be jobs there to support them. Once they move there, of course, then more jobs will become available as the economy picks up in the low-priced areas.
A UBI turns a flat tax into a progressive tax. UBI of $24,000 and flat tax of 50% means someone with income of $48,000 is paying 0% tax, $100,000 is paying 26% tax, a couple earning $120,000 total is paying 12%, a couple with two kidswith $250,000 total income is 30%, at $1,000,000 for one person the effective rate is 48%.
Are you talking to me? I voted Sauron. I have standards you know.
..."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.
... we are genetically bread ...
I am genetically human, but to each its own.
UBI still seems better to me than your tax suggestion, because it also increases consumption and allows people to flourish without constant fears about the future. It fosters unusual career paths and would result in many successful small companies and more creative "content producers". More education, music, writers, more handcrafting of luxury goods. These things are good for a modern industrialized society and the calculations of UBI costs I've seen are not that bad at all in comparison to expensive wellfare systems. (Arguably, the debate in the US is always a bit special, though, because an astonishingly huge number of people there seem to be willing to reject basic wellfare and just let people die in the streets.)
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.
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
"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.
The act of sex is a topic slashdot and its members have absolutely no authority on.
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
Well we certainly won't have to worry about it in the U.S. We can't even get universal basic healthcare, much less a universal basic income.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
It takes work to extract and transport resources. It takes work to grow, harvest, and transport food. So it's all work.
Yes, but oddly enough if you spend 10,000 times as much work to for example mine iron ore by hand, your labor-intensive iron ore isn't worth any more than when it's mined with much less work via machines. Almost as though its monetary value is not a measure of the work put into it.
People keep saying something like this whenever the government talks about raising minimum wage, and although it is true that costs do go up somewhat, the net long term effects on society as a whole have historically always been an increase in the standard of living for those on the lowest rungs of the earnings ladder. Why would a UBI be any different?
Because a scary amount of people in this country take a shattered economic theory as gospel. No amount of evidence that it is wrong- to the point in many instances of reality being a diametric opposite of its predictions- will ever convince these people, because they were raised believing it, and few people ever throw the yoke of the beliefs they were indoctrinated with as children. Cognitive dissonance is real, and it is strong.
It takes work to extract and transport resources. It takes work to grow, harvest, and transport food. So it's all work.
That's only half of the equation. The value of a thing is determined by supply and demand. Supply is arguably a function of the amount of work that goes into the thing, but demand is completely different, it's how much people want it. So price is really closer to Want divided by Work.
Fast Federal Court and I.T.C. updates
Society is evolving, not collapsing. In better parts of the world life has never been so good.
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.