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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."
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.
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%.
..."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.
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
The act of sex is a topic slashdot and its members have absolutely no authority on.
Apologies for poor quoting: relying on a phone.
Taxes will support it just fine. The misunderstanding is that everyone gets their annual 15k or whatever on top of whatever is happening right now. That's not the idea. The idea is that you rejig both taxes and ubi do that for example net income for a median tax earner doesn't change.
If there's no change in net income, and assuming gross salary doesn't change for many workers, then the total tax bill and expenditure is unchanged. Obviously I've simplified a bit, but basically you're scraping existing housing benefit, unemployment benefit etc etc and replacing it with basic income. There's no reason for the expenditure in total to change much.
As for operating businesses, I also disagree to some recent. It reminds me of the old joke about the farmer who won the lottery. When asked what he'd do he replied "keep farming until the money runs out". My new found albeit limited experience dealing with vendors and supply chains is that an awful lot of them seem to regard money as a messy technicality required in order to keep making their widgets. Anyway, taxes are a long long way from historical highs and there was plenty of business during periods of much higher taxation.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
If anything it should encourage private enterprise because you don't risk having zero money to eat and make rent
I think this is one of the critical pieces that everyone seems to ignore. It seems that most everyone thinks that UBI means more welfare and nothing changes culturally. I'd be shocked if that was the case.
I'm a decent writer, pretty solid cook, and I make pretty good beer. All of those things I do as hobbies because the risk in trying to do them as a job is too high for me. If I was given 2/3 or 3/4 of what I make now as UBI, I'd have to have a long talk with my wife about potentially quitting my job, being stay-at-home dad, and pursuing those hobbies as business ventures.
I can hardly imagine the boom in arts and culture that we'd see with UBI. All the starving musicians and artists who give up the dream to pay the mortgage would no longer have to. The sidewalk musician brightening our day would head home to a comfortable house, richer from the donations, but not starving if they are low for a day. I could see gardens and civic beautification projects exploding, as people with free time could invest it in their community. Kids would no longer be shipped off to day care with strangers. Parents could be more deeply involved in schools. Everyone with a crazy idea could pursue it, unlike now where most don't, because they can't afford to fail.
The parental engagement with kids may be the most significant impact financially. Kids who grow up in stable homes with involved parents do better in life than those who don't. They stay in school longer, stay out of trouble more, and, in general, become more productive members of society. If we can prevent 25% of the kids who get tangled up in the legal system and ER from doing that, either as kids or adults, that's a big savings for communities. If we can prevent 25% of the violent crime from happening, that's huge. And it could be more than that - most of the crime in my area is gang-driven, and the gangs form because the kids in them are desperate for a better life. If you can get paid enough to have a decent place to live, smoke weed, play video games, and shoot some hoops, being part of a gang is going to be a hard sell. And while the aforementioned weed smoker isn't going to be a productive member of society, if the choice is that or a gang-banger, I'll take the weed-smoker any day. The alternative is a serious negative impact on society, both in terms of happiness and overall financial well-being.
UBI will drive cultural change, the likes we haven't seen since abandoning agrarian society and moving into the mechanized one. I really think that with less poverty we'll see less chronic health issues (which increase hospital/ER costs tremendously) less crime (police and incarceration budgets are huge) more entrepreneurs (less organized labor and more individual and unique efforts, but potentially a broader tax-base) and there will be more people with expendable income to invest in those entrepreneurs.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
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.