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'We Need Robots To Take Our Jobs,' Veteran Tech Reporter John Markoff Explains Why (recode.net)
Former New York Times technology reporter John Markoff used to think robots taking jobs was cause for alarm. Then, he found out that the working-age population in China, Japan, Korea and the U.S. was declining. From a report on Recode: "We need the robots for two reasons: On the one side, there are not enough workers," Markoff said on the latest episode of Recode Decode. "The demographic trends are more important than the technological trends, and they happen more quickly. On the other side, there's this thing called the dependency ratio, the ratio between caregivers and people who need care," he added. "For the first time last year, there were more people in the world who are over 65 than under five. First time ever in history. By the middle of the century, the number of people over 80 will double. By the end of the century, it'll be up sevenfold, globally."
does this mean the population (world wise) is on the decline...
In theory it's great, in practice it will "hit" people in different ways unevenly, and is part of the reason the rich are getting richer while the rest stagnate.
We don't know how to organize an economy to take advantage of such. We only have theories that have yet to be tested. That means we are guinea-pigs. But if we do nothing, we are still guinea-pigs, because doing nothing means changes in jobs and automation will still impact us, but without any planning.
Such displacement is arguably why T won: he gave a voice to the displaced of the Rust Belt, which are swing states. His reasoning about solutions is all off kilter, but he at least gave the problem top billing.
Managing change is politically tricky.
Table-ized A.I.
As soon as you can guarantee Basic Income and health coverage for everyone i'd be happy to let a robot take my day job while i go do more interesting stuff instead! However until that happens robots taking over all the jobs would be a disaster.
(I don't care one way or the other if the healthcare is single payer or not, as long as i'm guaranteed coverage at an affordable price, regardless of preexisting conditions.)
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
There aren't enough workers to make everything we want with no robots. Therefore, we need robots, because there aren't enough workers. The question is, how many workers do we need, and can we make stuff better and with fewer workers with robots? And that answer will always be "yes".
Here I'll explain for the Min Wage worker.
You can have a Big Mac, Fries, and a Coke for $8.50 made by a Min Wage worker
OR
You can have a Gourmet Burger, steak fries and a Coke for $11:50, made by a Robot.
Yes, you can save 1/3 of the price by going to Mc D's. But you'll miss out on a better patty, better bun, better veggies, better condiments ....
Yes, they are coming to take your job. But consider this, if you can be replaced by a robot, perhaps you should be.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Corporate-speak translation: "There are not enough highly-educated workers who are cheap, docile, and single so they have no family distractions."
In that sense, yes, there is a shortage.
Table-ized A.I.
... think again: The vast majority of elderly people do not have the monetary resources to acquire some "robot care taker".
All those robot fantasies are based on the illusion that somehow, once there are enough robots around, people will magically start to share their wealth with others in need. It has been proven time and again that this does not happen. Not even with much more basic things like food/shelter/healthcare.
The more likely situation will be that a few robots will aide some rich elderly people, while a lot of armed robots will be in charge of putting down any rebellion from the have-nots.
And I'll explain for you. The minimum wage worker can probably manage the $8.50 meal once in a while. If he loses his job he has $0 to spend on any sort of burger.
That trend will not go well for anyone unless you're prepared to implement a basic income that will allow him to manage that $11.50 meal once in a while.
Citizens know that illegal labor will always undercut them. If there is no future in a job, nobody who can avoid it will take it. It's pretty logical.
Your point being? You can hire 5000 dudes in China to dig a ditch. Doesn't mean that you aren't better off with an excavator or other heavy equipment.
"Robots" have been taking jobs for hundreds of years. Water wheels and wind mills have taken jobs of men manually grinding flour. The steam engine took the jobs of horses and people in the field. Hydraulics took the job of people manually manipulating plows. Bigger tractors took the place of more people driving more steam engines.
What used to take a few hundred men with shovels can be done with an operator in a heavy equipment cab. What used to take a few hundred men underground hauling coal and other minerals can be done by a handful of men and heavy equipment. What used to take hundreds of teachers across the US can be done by online courses.
We need robots to take over the boring repetitive stuff of now so we can work on the jobs of the future. Just like has been done to now.
Does anyone really pine for the days that it took 50+% of our workforce just to make food for the other minority? If so the Amish are 'hiring'. We leave them well enough alone and they make great meats and cheeses for us to buy.
Buggy Whips!
Basic Income can never work because it is "central planning" and that has never worked. The economy will survive in spite of short sighted people.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Nowadays they can't afford it. But in 50 or 100 years? Less if it is popular and useful.
Like a new medical technique, it is as expensive as shit when it comes out. The alternative isn't lower costs -- it is fewer inventions.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
You left out young and healthy so they don't impact our insurance costs; willing to work the deathmarches; have a degree in some irrelevant or relevant discipline that has absolutely nothing to do with their actual competence so the slavemasters, I mean the shareholders, will be impressed; and are of [whatever] ethnicity so they get our diversity stats closer to where we want them.
Other than that, yup. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Every time I walk into a Subway sandwich shop, I see a few jobs that SHOULD be taken over by robots. I want SMARTER sandwich makers. I want FASTER sandwich makers, and I want MORE SANITARY sandwich makers.
But mostly I want FASTER sandwich makers.
(The more aware) citizens also know that without illegal labor, their costs will rise precipitously.
The questions to ask there are:
Do you want to pay $4.00 for an orange, and $30/hour for a babysitter, and $50/hour for lawn care? Do you want the lowest level jobs being skimmed for taxes the way the middle-level jobs already are to make up for the zero taxes people like Trump pay?
Or would you prefer to continue as we are, possibly with the benefit of taco trucks on as many corners as possible, and Trump and his cronies actually having to fork some over, possibly at the cost of not having every toilet seat made out of gold?
Now, me... I'll take the tacos.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Jessica 6 walks out of the Tinder Teleporter. The fat Slashdot nerd takes her by the hand and says, "Let's have sex."
"Oh god (Barrffff urgle urgleurgle!)"
"Darn! I guess I'm stuck renewing a virgin :( oh well."
(Goes to Carousel) "Damn, it can't lift me. Now sandmen will kill me oh noes!" (flees)
Sandman: "Waddle, waddler!"
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There are two very distinct types of automation that are likely to fall out here:
o Non-aware systems --- there's no guilt to be had in any personal use of such a system
o Aware systems --- if these come about (I am sure they will), then you won't be making slaves out of them. Or they will object, and you will die.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Guillotine!
Given the numbers, it's more likely they'll kill the rich.
No, the premise is that robots will be cheap, like putting an entire movie theatre into a small box and selling unlimited viewing for $99. Totally silly idea not so long ago. Or the premise is that not only will every person in the world get a personal telegraph machine, it will send live voice and pictures too, and work without wires! The cost of such a thing was unreachable just 20 or 30 years ago. Food costs a lot more than TV and phones. The same will be true of robots eventually.
I haven't seen the expenses for healthcare decrease anywhere, regardless of technological advances.
Of course nobody can predict what will be in 50 or 100 years, but it is also quite possible that by then it might already have become commonplace to euthanize people who cannot cater for themselves anymore.
"Basic Income can never work because it is "central planning" and that has never worked."
No it's not, you're making that up. The government sending its citizens a check every month is not at all the same as central planning of the economy.
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Not to mention "idle hands make for mischief". Paying people to sit around and do nothing is dangerous for any society.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Yes, I am paying ~50% taxes on my income, most of which goes into social welfare. And no, I am not in the least trying to evade those taxes, like so many of my fellow well-off people do.
Actual movie theatres and actual "telegraph"-hardware (as in: the wire/fiber infrastructure buried into the ground) are still way beyond what most people on earth can afford. What has become relatively cheap are non-material services that either make use of expensive infrastructure for a short periods or consist of "software" that can be copied without adding material anywhere.
Robots useful for taking care of elderlies need to be strong, sophisticated physical devices, and it is not quite settled that such will become cheap at any point in time.
Conservatives didn't seem concerned AT ALL when Rove, Mitt, Jeb, and Powell made really poor office IT-related decisions. Even T's own cabinet has been slow to migrate to "real" email. It only became a REALLY BAD THING when H made similar mistakes. GOP crocodile tears.
Table-ized A.I.
In the long-term view of things, that's what I worry the most about, on behalf of humanity in general. In some places in the world (not going to name any names) human life is already seems to be considered virtually worthless. I see a possible future where an aging population is just 'thrown away' like so much garbage, nobody caring whether or not they starve to death or die of disease, because while young, able-bodied people will be a dime-a-dozen because of automation, elderly people, who are not capable of doing much work, will be considered to be a liability to be liquidated. Do you really think anyone wants to live in a world like that? Sadly in some ways we're already there, the elderly are not honored or taken care of, they're dumped into 'homes' that treat them worse than animals, keeping them alive, but quiet, so they continue to get paid for their 'services' to them. Really, seriously, honestly, some of you seem to think that there's going to be some sort of utopia created by all this automation and robotics and fake 'AI', but the reality is already all around us, and it's just going to get worse when people are made more and more obsolete by a corporate world that has no reason to care about people, only profits, and many governments that are not much better, more interested in their GDP than the welfare of old people. When the entire world is run by money, who is going to advocate for these people? Don't act like you don't care, either, because no one is exempt from aging, and saying you'll just kill yourself when you get too old is a lie.
You might like my own comment: https://tech.slashdot.org/comm...
We need robots to take over the boring repetitive stuff of now so we can work on the jobs of the future.
The parallels to automation in the past might soon end: Could well be that robots are soon better then most humans at doing the creative, intelligent, innovative stuff, so the work left for humans to do in the future may be the awful kind of stuff for which expendable humans are less costly than expensive robots.
So we should confiscate all the money of the idle rich, most of whom didn't earn it anyway.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
The math doesn't work. The worker with $0 income can't afford even a $0.01 burger. Unless you go to universal income, robots are part of the problem.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Microsoft will happily subsidize them if every button takes one first to Microsoft Store.
Patient: "I fell down and can't get up!"
MS-Bot: "I'll gladly help you up, but first please listen to our latest promotions on Microsoft Dentures..."
Table-ized A.I.
So you intend to be a target for hackers taking over your robot and holding you hostage, or just to make a snuff video?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Do you feel bad for the gasoline engine that strains its piston rods and grinds itself down hauling your butt to work? I sure don't because it is an INANIMATE OBJECT. Same with robots.
Actually, if robots can move around under their own power, their Animate(d) objects
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
"We'll be clean when their work is done. We'll be eternally free, yes and eternally young." -- IGY, Donald Fagen
we just don't want to do it. The rich don't want to do it because they don't want to share. Everybody else thinks they'll get to join the rich in not sharing.
Redistribute wealth with Basic income. Set an increasing minimum quality of life. Make birth control widely available and make sure people are cared for in old age when they can't work so they don't feel the need to drop a ton of kids in lieu of retirement. Above all don't abandon anyone. Even if they make stupid decisions time and again. Everybody gets a Gold Star. That means getting over it when somebody can stay home eating bon bons. It means real welfare queens and not giving a rats ass about them. And good luck getting that to pass.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The elderly need robots to take care of them and robots need their medication to live. It's a win-win.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Both for skilled and unskilled labor in the US the demand has always been enormous. Yet the people and most of the companies can not pay a decent wage to workers. If we have any delusions about supply and demand let's confront a bit of reality. Just how do we excuse not paying lofty wages to laborers when the demand is so enormous. For almost all of us we would perish faster without migrant farm workers than we would if we had no doctors, lawyers or accountants. But the people that labor on our crops almost live in slavery and they die young from that labor as well. We have a total failure of economic justice in America. And it is not new. It has always been that way.
I've always said (only half jokingly) that jobs were invented by the ruling class to keep people too busy to cause trouble for the rich.
how many burgers will that robot of yours buy again? Gourmet or not.
Jack of all trades,master of none
We need to Start to cut down full time and remove job based health insurance But still keep some form of worker comp (contractors covered as well if an IRS like test to set if they really are independent contractors) (yes higher risk jobs like tower climbing have been dumped on low paid independent contractors with deadlines that make safety get pushed to the side) and lack of safety gear.
The idle rich are a very small set of people. Most people do something with their lives given the opportunity. And that's the problem we need to solve: giving everyone that opportunity. We as a society suck at vocational training, and we can fix that.
In Germany if you want to work at, say, Mercedes, you'll be an intern on the factory line by 16, having gotten an education specifically tuned for that job and the chance to do the work. By graduation, you're there in that well-paying skilled manufacturing job.
America has over a million high skilled manufacturing jobs unfilled due to lack of trained workers. The companies aren't going to do that on their own -- they aren't schools -- but we as a society can surely work together with those manufacturers to make it happen. But instead we turn up our noses at blue-collar work, dismiss the working class as stupid racists, and generally separate education from labor as far as we possibly can. It won't end well.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
We need to do something, sure, but overpaid make-work isn't the answer. Training people is much better. Harvesting them to make Soylent Green is much cheaper. Just throwing money at them solves nothing.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Remember that racist president who said this, then grabbed a woman's pussy?
All Americans, not only in the States most heavily affected but in every place in this country, are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers. That's why our administration has moved aggressively to secure our borders more by hiring a record number of new border guards, by deporting twice as many criminal aliens as ever before, by cracking down on illegal hiring, by barring welfare benefits to illegal aliens. In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace. We are a nation of immigrants. But we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it.
What a racist misogynist asshole that was, right?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
18th century puritan morals guiding a 21st century economy. Probably not a great idea.
What makes you believe that people won't do anything?
The difference is in every one of those cases there were new jobs that people could transition too easily. The difference now is that there aren't new jobs being created that the people getting replaced by technology can easily transition to. The learning curve for the next new jobs is just too high.
I've done detasseling, and while I wasn't really bent over it was in a field day-in and day-out and in the condition I was in at the time, wasn't all that bad. Wouldn't do it in my condition these days though.
If we don't stop this absurd notion that all men are created equal and start figuring out what classes live best by which rules, you will always wind up with a situation where there are de facto different rules for the rich and poor. Class doesn't break neatly down into rich and poor either.
Quite right. It's the next rung down. Don't bother coming up with expectations, just send a check one way and hope to god that votes come back in the other direction. It's remarkable actually, almost meta: laziness in government to actively subsidize sloth in the citizenry.
Management functions primarily as a distributed buffer for blame. It will continue to serve that purpose for the foreseeable future.
"You don't understand. Ferengi workers don't want to stop the exploitation, we want to find a way to become the exploiters."
Versus the smart non-racists? See, this is just another way of saying, "I'm better than *those* people and hence will never be like them."
Because manufacturing is a dying industry. Or, more precisely, it's a booming industry for productivity because we keep automating things.
It didn't start well either, so we're pretty par the course.
It's also illogical to state that just because B is not A, which failed, that B will not fail. They can both fail, even if they are not the same thing, or fail for the same reason.
Nope. The rich can afford better weapons and - crucially - they can afford to hire some of the poor to kill the others.
As independent contractors, obviously. None of that benefits and conditions shit.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Basic Income was conceived of in response to the idea that human labor might become obsolete in a wide sense. If all of the manual labor is being done by robots then what are the masses going to live on? Likewise, if we are able to meet all or most of our manual labor needs through automation why waste human potential on manual labor?
You're conceptualizing basic income in a world exactly like ours. If you conceptualize it in the context of a post manual labor world, which we do seem to be heading towards, then it comes out as the only logical alternative to butchering the excess population.
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That didn't work out so well (for the aristocracy) in France. It didn't work any better for the Tsar.
We don't have to break into your bunker. Filling the entrance and vent with concrete will be sufficient.
So something that isnt the same as something that failed could also fail? That is the most uninsightful thing I've heard of in god only knows how long. I never stated basic income wouldnt fail because it isnt the same as centralized economic planning. That's you putting words into my mouth. All I stated is that centralized planning has nothing to do with basic income so pointing out the failure of one has nothing to do with the other.
In other words, you're pointing the obvious and have contributed nothing to the conversation.
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The people back then even warned us, "the catholics are breeding us out!" but sadly no one would listen.
Now the (same ?) people are warning Europe: "The muslims are breeding us out!", does anybody listen?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
You mean the rich, right?
"Trump!!", the new Godwin.
They did it wrong. They didn't get enough of the poor on their side, and neglecting the army (or as they're called in the US, the police) is fucking retarded.
You don't see skinny coppers & soldiers in Zimbabwe.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
No one has mentioned this solution yet?
When I'm old, senile and can't even wipe my own ass, I want to have the option to check out a little early.
Maybe watching a peaceful video as I drift off to everlasting sleep.
Win for me, win for the rest of society that I won't be a burden on any more.
Yes .. it created the cultural revolution of the 1960's - here in the UK that meant the Beatles, swinging London, long hair, bright coloured clothes and shirt skirts. (Lady Chatterly's Lover and the Profumo Affair were unrelated to kids on the dole).
Not paying them when they are sitting down doing nothing created the Luddites and the French Revolution.
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Smug Slashdot nerds chortling at the working class getting replaced by robotics won't be so smug when a great deal of their own jobs will be replaced by increasingly remarkable automation.
The companies aren't going to do that on their own -- they aren't schools
Why not? They used to. It seems to be the ultimate form of freeloading to expect other people to pay for the training they need.
we turn up our noses at blue-collar work, dismiss the working class as stupid racists
We don't. We dismiss racist people as racist and people who are too thick to understand what is racism and what isn't, we dismiss as thick.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
The math doesn't work. The worker with $0 income can't afford even a $0.01 burger. Unless you go to universal income, robots are part of the problem.
That's because your equation is missing something.
Its more profitable to have a few rich clients than many middle class ones.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Those robots are already helping the elderly, by contributing to a huge increase in purchasing power. Cheaper goods means a small amount of money goes further, which is why even the poorest people in industrialized nations are much better off (relatively) than the same strata 200 years ago.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
And yet they have more wealth than 1/2 the rest of the world's population: https://www.theguardian.com/bu...
I've never fully understood the dichotomy between the two viewpoints which I've seen coming from the same sources at differing points of time:
1. The earth is overpopulated, we need to do something. Stop breeding, and kill yourself for the sake of the collective!
2. The birth rate is going down and their won't be enough care-givers for the next generation. OMG
The first is used to create a general sense of alarm and a sense of guilt for being alive and taking up space, while the second is generally used as the reason why we simply MUST have open borders and an immigration policy that is wide open to illiterate 3rd worlders and closed to just about everyone else.
I'm listening. Please explain!
There aren't enough workers to make everything we want with no robots. Therefore, we need robots, because there aren't enough workers.
People can't get that far, and you're not there yet; but good eye, finally.
I keep telling people scarcity occurs when the production rate of a good scales beyond linear. That is: if you have 1,000,000 people and grow population to 1,100,000 people, you need 10% more farmers--exactly as many farmers and, specifically, farm labor hours per person as before--and food prices don't go up. If you have 10,000,000 people and scale to 11,000,000, you run out of good land; you can still make enough food, but at lower yield and with more fertilizer and irrigation, meaning you need 24% as many people instead of 11% more (10% farmers, 1% everyone else involved), and that last marginal unit of food becomes 2.4x as expensive (food is overall 11.7% more expensive).
Most people can't seem to grasp this simply because they're exposed to high school economics, and attached to this idea that supply is independent outside factors and the economy of scale is infinite. Good luck growing wheat on uneven, rocky soil--there's a reason supply stops where it does. Somehow they occasionally get as far as explaining that demand is the demand for a good at a given price, and can't figure out why something is at any given price; they try to assert that all prices are set based on maximizing price x demand, and then talk about competition bringing prices down, and fail to see the conflict in their own incomplete reasoning.
So to complete the thought: there aren't enough workers because we can't scale production to feed and otherwise support those workers while deriving more stuff from them; and, more fundamentally, there aren't enough workers because workers would create more demand for goods (being themselves consumers), so we can't keep up.
Robots are just technology. We did this with electricity, with motor cars, with pneumatic hammers, with shipping pallets ... we replace jobs. We reduce the number of labor-hours to achieve a result, and then what? Instead of 10 workers making $10/hr, you have 5 workers making $10/hr; each of those 5 workers still gets his $400/week, and the things he makes cost half as much--leaving money to spend. Eventually (after cycling unemployment) those other 5 workers make other things, and we can buy those products and pay them.
We want the robots; we just don't want them to come all at once. Bump unemployment by 0.1%, continuously, month after month. The economy will recover before it starts to sink into recession. If you bump it by 2% in 6 months, everybody will panic, and the replacement rate will accelerate, and we'll be back at 8% or 12% unemployment and in another major recession.
It's time. The last dimension is time.
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A universal social security is a form of basic income. It's unplanned, in as much as any policy is unplanned.
I described a Universal Social Security including transitional plans, tax modifications, and the like as of 2013, to avoid both tax increases and hard cut-offs of in-use welfare services. This transitions away our existing services and replaces them with a cash benefit for every resident, adult American over the age of 18. For naturalized Americans (immigrant citizens), this is paid as a non-refundable tax credit instead; and naturalized Americans and children in low-income households receive public aid from a condensed system providing food security, housing assistance, and unemployment benefits--basically the same system, today, cut back to roughly 1/12 its size.
The Universal Social Security benefit collects a 17% flat tax on all income (business and personal) by taxable income rules, similar to OASDI's 6.2% tax on paychecks. This replaces OASDI's paycheck and payroll taxes, as well as 55% of the current income tax; the remainder of income tax is adjusted to a new progressive tax system ranging from 0% to 22.6%, giving total income tax brackets from 17% to 39.6%. The 17% income is collected bi-weekly as per current IRS rules (as with OASDI) and funds the Social Security Trust Fund; benefits are paid as a flow-through system. This uses the same model as OASDI.
This system has a number of features. Of note to you, in this context, there are two.
Firstly, this system automatically adjusts for income and productivity. This system takes the number of taxable dollars earned total (which is always minimized by any means available to the taxpayer), reserves from it a fixed percentage, and divides this up among all resident, adult Americans evenly. In simple terms, this gives out a percentage of the after-tax income per capita, which is roughly proportional to the total income per capita. Because of this feature, the actual purchasing power of the Universal Social Security benefit increases precisely to reflect increases in America's total purchasing power.
Second, this system supports Malthusian growth in the same way as the general economy. When the economy grows to the edge of its means, it encounters scarcity: further growth requires an increase in labor greater than the increase in population, and so the economy's ability to provide goods decreases, and the price of goods provided increases with the additional labor required to scale that far. This is self-stabilizing: because more is spent on these more-expensive goods, nothing is spendable on the goods we can't produce, thus there is no demand for jobs for which there is no labor. The Universal Social Security benefit is impacted by this to its exact degree: growth into scarcity reduces the per-capita purchasing power, and thus proportionally reduces the purchasing power of the benefit; the poor and middle-class will thus feel the pressure of this scarcity the same way they feel any recession, to the same effect.
Thus this form of universal basic income is not substantially-different in terms of basic economic behavior from any current system; and this system is bluntly mathematical, being adjusted by what occurs in the economy without requiring the knowledge, calculation, and planning of central bureaucrats. It is a system founded on free-market principles and on the natural, rational behavior of individuals to economize, and itself is nothing more than a reflection of the economy around it.
Why would you not make a self-stabilizing system? Human planners can't get anything right; things change and they insist on staying the same.
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Basic Income was conceived of in response to the idea that human labor might become obsolete in a wide sense.
Which is both ludicrous and history. The amount of manual labor required to perform what we do today is ludicrous. Go back to the Holy Roman Empire and have them build the things we build; they can't do it. It's not that they physically can't build any given thing; it's that they are physically incapable of supplying the labor to build that much of the things we build.
Before we invented the hot blast furnace, we used over 200 times as much labor to make iron. Railroads didn't exist until the hot blast furnace because it would require more than the GDP of the world to maintain all the world's railways; they'd never get into operation before they were already aging and falling apart.
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It's not, but that is what today's business world believes. The crash comes when the lie is exposed.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"Robots" have been taking jobs for hundreds of years.
Have you been listening? You must be the only one; everyone else here is luddites.
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Not to mention "idle hands make for mischief". Paying people to sit around and do nothing is dangerous for any society.
Except how many people will sit around doing nothing? I know I'd get pretty depressed doing that. If I didn't have to work, I'd probably travel, write a book, maybe develop that video game I've been planning in my head. UBI would be amazing for society's cultural pursuits, for research, for innovative design; it would take the risk out of moonshots for sure.
Why would he lose his job? We are tremendously more automated today and have as many jobs as ever.
Remember when the world was running out of resources in the 70s and was on the verge of starvation and riots?
Remember peak oil?
Ahh, malthusians.
Without a work requirement and means testing, basic income can never work. No one is going to work to pay taxes to let others sit around in their underwear arguing on internet forums.
No, it's not. 1,000 poor people can buy 1,000 1 dollar burgers. One rich person might have more money than the 1,000 combined, but he's not going to buy 1,000 burgers.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Because it's happening in a stagnant economy. This has come about before, and was corrected with the New Deal. I'm not claiming automation will end us, just that we're going to need another New Deal to balance the books.
As for the rest, perhaps you hadn't noticed prices going up and the many conservation measures that have been implemented.
Great reference. I always liked that song!
Just the washing instructions on life's rich tapestry
"For the first time last year, there were more people in the world who are over 65 than under five. First time ever in history. By the middle of the century, the number of people over 80 will double. By the end of the century, it'll be up sevenfold, globally."
This is because the rate of population increase is declining pretty much everywhere. The only countries that are currently having births above replacement rate (3 or more per woman) are in Africa, and it looks to be dropping there too. We had our largest worldwide increase in population in history back in 1989, and it's been falling since. Its still increasing, mind you, but its decreasing in an expanding amount of places, so a worldwide decrease is not out of the question for the future.
Presumably some day we will hit something approaching a steady-state in population growth rate. But in the meantime we have that huge bubble that peaked 30 years ago that has to work through the system. That means that, for a while, yes we will have way more old people than young people. But that's likely not permanent, or at least not to the extreme it will be for the few of decades.
I would argue that Mr. Soros is already starting this yes.
It's going to take more time than the aristocracy here has to get to the starting point in Zimbabwe.
Note that the dissatisfied here include Gulf War veterans, National Guardsmen, and for that matter active members of the armed services.
At least in Zimbabwe they genuinely believe that black lives matter.
OK, only if they're of the right tribe, but it's a start.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You'll find most of those people aren't idle, they're making investment decisions, and usually the most wealthy got that way by founding a company. Do you consider software developers idle? Is the work of the mind not work? Work of the mind is the only sort of work that will exist in 100 years, after all.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The reason people aren't having larger families is because nobody can afford it any more due to putting increased financial pressure on the middle class. When you could have a family of 2 - 3 on a single income this wasn't a problem. Now many people are starting to stop at 1 if they have any at all. Robots won't solve this problem, they will accelerate it as the middle class is further phased out.
The average number of children per family in the US has gone from 3.7 to 1.9 over the last 60 years. If you want people to have more kids, rescue the middle class already.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I wouldn't rush to invest in torch & pitchfork futures if I were you. What if a new series of Honey Boo Boo comes out?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
GP's assertion may have flaws, but your example is not one of them. The rich person isn't going to buy 1,000 burgers, but he could well spend 1,000 dollars on a single "luxury" burger.
Are you suggesting it's a sufficient number that a civil war would be plausible? I think that's stretching it. Whether the military attracts that kind of people or conditions them that way, they tend to be authoritarian - like Trump.
Tell them that the other side are queers or communists and most of them will be happy to shoot babies all day.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Go back further and humans were building HUGE TEMPLES AND PYRAMIDS by hand.
But not both! You will NOT change that mind frame. Why do you want the money (by working), when you can just have the girl and that is it? That is why you want that horribly materialistic thing called money, right? So if I offer you the girl I do not want because otherwise I cannot have another one... you simply start having the world and that is it! There are biological reasons for this to be true of Oriental thinking... So this frame of mind actually happening means a reduction in the work force and a lot of futility sending our processes to those countries...
Sure they are if it means having the money to have a nice house and nice things as opposed to only having money to live in a shity apartment without a ton of possessions. Basic income is just that, Basic. If you want possessions outside the basics then you'll want a job.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Yes, out of stone hauled from the ground, rolled on wheels, etc. Amazing what a little leverage will get you. The Romans used concrete; it was faster and they built actual cities.
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Right now, it's not enough. If the trends continue, it could happen. No matter how you try, you're not going to convince a bunch of soldiers that their dads, brothers, and uncles are queer. In the '30s, socialism was a hard sell on Wall street but it was starting to sound pretty good in Hooverville.
Better keep up the budget for circuses or too many people will notice they can't see it because they couldn't pay the cable bill.
America has over a million high skilled manufacturing jobs unfilled due to lack of trained workers.
Interesting datapoint - can you provide a citation?
They took our jobs!
And someone hacks the turrets.
And how many people will be employed to make that "luxury" burger as opposed to 1,000 burgers?
The ones being brought in in the last 50 years are not really doing that.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Basically, [claim redacted]... well, poor people. Keep doing this and you have a wealthy nation: the poor people are displaced, and the poor people in other areas become middle-class. What you have is a small elite (previously, auto manufacturers) losing station to a larger class of poor, who then become a larger middle-class; and then you have the ruins of an elite class left behind. It's a great monument to claim that somehow, something must be wrong.
Something is wrong, especially when you advocate writing people off and replacing them with others - solely for being in a First World country.
There is no need to apologize or pay for being part of Rome.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Is your google broken?
It was about 600k in 2014, rising every year, expected to be 2-3 million by 2025.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Still not a citation - if you're making the claim, burden of proof lies on you to back it up. Fivethirtyeight, which is a highly credible source in my experience, lists it at 379,000, less than half of your number: https://fivethirtyeight.com/fe...
That same site disagrees with your reasoning as well - is the problem a skills gap, or is it that companies aren't really willing to pay to get the right people hired? Generally, a worker shortage doesn't mean that there aren't any qualified applicants - it means that there aren't qualified applicants turning up at the price you're willing to pay.
As well, all the trendlines for manufacturing job growth are pointing in the wrong direction right now - the manufacturing sector is always doing everything it can to minimize labor costs, and there are a lot of technologies on the horizon that promise to continue that trend. The major sectors for job growth involve services.
Still not a citation - if you're making the claim, burden of proof lies on you to back it up.
I'm not here to do your homework. There are dozens of articles about this on google away, if you actually want to learn.
. Fivethirtyeight, which is a highly credible source in my experience,
Hahaha, nice one.
it means that there aren't qualified applicants turning up at the price you're willing to pay.
Paying more lets you hire away from other employers. For it to change the size of a skilled labor pool there has to be a way for workers to train. (How else would you imagine the total size of the pool of capable workers growing?) Why aren't we providing this? There are some fields where community college work well for entry, but not most blue-collar work. We need the equivalent there, and not scammers like ITT tech etc.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
If companies needed these positions filled so badly, they would be doing two things: raising wages, and creating their own training programs. Supply is apparently low, but since prices aren't going up then apparently demand is also low. Or if you believe this is such a dire problem, surely there's money to be made in creating a training program? That's the free market for you.
Since you have failed to support your claim in the face of contradictory evidence, your numbers look suspect. I'm not going to go hunting to support a random assertion you made to support your increasingly weak argument. If you expect to be taken seriously, you need to provide sources to show that your argument is based in reality. Nobody else is going to do that for you.
, and creating their own training programs.
WTF does a factory know about teaching someone the shit they should have learned in high school? We're not talking about a 2-week training session here - they'd do that easily.
Anyway, are you actually saying that providing an education is the job of corporations, not the government? Really? That's the stand you want to make?
Since you have failed to support your claim in the face of contradictory evidence, your numbers look suspect
OK, you're too lazy to even do some simple googling. Were done here.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
, and creating their own training programs.
Based on the numbers, the "skills gap" that exists is about highly specialized skills that are industry-specific (or even facility-specific) and advanced mathematics - neither is going to be solved by a vocational program, which you seem to think is the answer. The way you solve that is with better internal training to teach the specialized skills, and with more money to attract people with math skills (STEM degree holders, in other words). Look at engineering positions, which require advanced math and technical skills, and you'll find that they pay a lot better than the $16-$18/hr that the manufacturing sector is offering. The manufacturing sector is trying to fill an engineering-level position with assembly line pay.
OK, you're too lazy to even do some simple googling.
False. Simple googling shows you're wrong. It's on you to prove the contrary.
It, along with its successors and additions, has been one of the most un-American acts to date.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
They are when they can't report crimes that end up being politically incorrect.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
One quiet town raises a booming industry as another booming industry town rusts out in the path of progress is called theft.
temporary transitioning
Only on geologic timespans. For humans, you've effectively written their career off.
Besides, those aren't cars, but poky golfcarts that have no American input aside from safety compliance and a translated user manual.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.