Population Of US Adults: 245,630,000Ã--$10,000 = $2.4563e12
Please do tell about all the savings.
Considering you didn't read anything I wrote, I will restate that my calculations only included working age adults and assumes only the bottom two quintiles will receive a net $10k increase in income from a basic income. The next two quintiles will pay approximately $10k extra in taxes to counteract their $10k basic income, and the top quintile pays for the bottom 40%.
This is why only $8e9 income is required. And since at least $5e9 in existing welfare and police state could be reduced, the net increase in income taxes would likely be closer to $3e9.
Just using quick back of napkin calculations, if you enacted a $10k / year basic income for all adults you could get rid of almost all welfare programs.
I'm not sure how that works. $10K/year is about 2/3 of minimum wage, and plenty of people making more than that are still on some kind of assistance. Even in a two-parent home with both parents getting $10K each, it's going to be very tight.
The goal of a basic income is not to allow everyone to not work. It is to allow people to live a comfortable life even if their economic value is less than minimum wage. How many jobs could be created if maids could work for $4/hour because they get 50% of their income from a basic income? How many fewer jobs would go overseas if factory workers could have a comfortable life making only $8 per hour? I sure would find a neighbor to split the costs of a full time housekeeper to work 20 hours per week at each house for $500 per month. Beats only getting one cleaning per month for $200, but no laundry or dishes done.
Basic income's end goal is to create more economic opportunity by not eliminating jobs simply because they are not valuable enough to pay a living wage. A whole new category of service level jobs could open up that would have once been far too expensive if everyone needed to be paid minimum wage. You also remove the perverse incentive of needing to work multiple jobs just to put food on the table.
Now that's just silly. $100/day for daycare? That's more than twice the U.S. national average and closer to about 5 times what most people actually pay.
That is for two kids (a toddler and infant), and it is in one of the priciest neighborhoods in Illinois. In this area, even the cheapest daycares where few of the teachers are college educated and ratios are at the state minimum are almost $1500 per month for an infant. I pay $1700 for an infant and $1500 for a toddler. Infants have a state mandated 1:4 teacher:infant ratio, but the ratio is 1:10 for 3 year olds. So parents with infants and toddlers pay far more than the national averages.
Parents without means generally pay far less for a neighborhood stay at home parent or family member to watch their kids. This likely costs around half as much as a licensed day care center, but kids in these types of settings perform moderately worse in school even after adjusting for socio-economic factors.
I sure hope they don't mess it up and give further ammunition to those who are against basic income in the US. I personally think implementing a basic income is a no-brainer, but it has some stiff political hurdles to overcome.
Just using quick back of napkin calculations, if you enacted a $10k / year basic income for all adults you could get rid of almost all welfare programs. In the US local, state, and federal governments pay $512 billion in general welfare, unemployment, and housing. The $212.7 billion spent on police and prisons could also be reduced. Seeing a combined $500 billion in savings is a very reasonable estimate.
Today about 20% of the population pays almost all the federal taxes, the next 40% pay next to nothing, and the next 40% get money back. Using a similar formula for paying for basic income, the top quintile would pay for the benefits of the bottom two quintiles. The other two quintiles would have their taxes raised on average the same amount as the basic income. 20% of the payments would come from increased corporate income taxes (the same proportion of federal income taxes they already pay).
The bottom two quintiles include 80 million working age adults. This would require $800 billion in increased taxes to pay for. Considering society would save at least $500 billion in other taxes, this is reduced to $300 billion. I'm convinced there would be further savings, but for arguments sake lets just stick with a $300 billion price tag. This is a 17.5% increase in taxes to corporations and the top quintile of earners (roughly households with over $110k incomes). Even if we couldn't find a way to make corporations pay more, it would be a 21% tax increase on just the top quintile of earners.
I make a little over $200k per year and pay a little under $30k in federal taxes. I would gladly pay another $400 per month in taxes to enact a $10k basic income (technically $1200 more taxes per month with an $800 basic income). This would probably greatly decrease the costs of low-skill labor intensive expenses I have like the $3200 per month I spend on daycare, so it could be virtually free for many high earners.
Even if we had to increase the deficit $300 billion per year until the benefits of a basic income were felt by the economy, it would be a better use of stimulus than the almost $1 trillion given out since the 2008 crash.
You can easily find several news stories about glassholes being beaten and even sent to hospitals. However, I cannot find a single story about someone being arrested for assaulting a glasshole.
You are sadly correct that most assholes who break laws are never caught. Especially for minor crimes like muggings and robberies. The good thing is most people are not assholes, which is why the vast majority of Google Glass wearers were never assaulted.
I've been waiting on AI to start disrupting Jobs for a decade now. As far as I know Amazon's Technical Turks are still profitable.
If you haven't seen AI disrupting jobs, you haven't been looking very hard. The average U.S. factory worker is responsible today for more than $180,000 of annual output, triple the $60,000 in 1972. "We're able to produce twice as much manufacturing output today as in the 1970's, with about seven million fewer workers. In many industries, the increase in productivity has exceeded Perry’s estimates. 'Thirty years ago, it took ten hours per worker to produce one ton of steel,' said U.S. Steel CEO John Surma in 2011. 'Today, it takes two hours.'"
Not all of this is AI, but a great deal of it is. Robotics and improved operations is the primary cause of this rise in productivity, and the industry isn't done improving yet.
the problem is when the bottom 80% get pissed enough to start a revolution. the top 20% then better hope they have enough killbots to subdue it.
The US already has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. With 4.4% of the world's population, we house about 22% of the world's prisoners. This is arguably only necessary because of the high levels of social inequality in the United States.
You don't need killbots for the entire 80% of the population. You just need a way for 60% of the population to think 20% of the population is a danger to them. The 60% will then gladly give up some freedoms to keep themselves safe from those dangerous elements.
The USA shrinking middle class is definitely not due to automation. Otherwise it would be far worse in Australia where we enforce a high minimum wage
First off, the majority of the shrinking middle class is in the direction of households rising above the middle class. So its more likely that countries with a constant middle class are ones which create barriers preventing households from become more prosperous. Combine expensive social programs paid for with taxes on the upper class and social programs that prevent people from being poor, and you have a large middle class event despite market forces that would normally have shrunk the middle class. I'm not saying this is a bad thing (although I like a basic income far more than minimum wages) but whenever a country increases socialist programs they will diminish the effects of market forces on their economy.
Australia will be one of (if not the) first country to experience automation replacement due to our high wages, USA will lag behind many countries due to the pathetic slave wages allowed.
This could be, but countries whose upper class have more money will also have more capital to spend on automation. Its hard to tell which market forces will cause more rapid adoption of automation.
OK, let's get this straight: a butler is not a "low-end service job". A butler is equivalent to the CEO of a small company, and should be paid commensurately. If you think it's all about answering the door and serving the dinner, you're thinking of a housekeeper, which is something else entirely.
If you demand to use old British definitions of terms then a housekeeper is simply the female version of a butler. Perhaps you meant a maid or hall boy.
Because households large enough to have a large retinue of domestic workers is rare in modern times, a butler rarely describes the type of position you are referring to. At least in the US. Since the OP said he couldn't wait for his butler, it is clear he meant a butler that would work for an upper middle class professional family. In this case the butler is usually either the only domestic worker or perhaps one of two (with a nanny being the most common second worker).
In this situation, a butler is nothing like a CEO of a small company. It is mostly a combination of maid and personal assistant.
Why mod this down? It's fairly accurate. As a 20 year veteran in the field I really do understand where the article poster is coming from and as a 20 year old veteran I also know where the OP of this thread is coming from.
It was modded down because it didn't do anything other than insult the article poster. You provided enough substance to start an actual discussion, but the original AC just acted like a troll.
Not to say that people over the age of 40 can't move in the technical world but it's difficult and if pay is a question then it's that much harder.
This is quite true, especially the last part about pay. I am higher paid than most of my coworkers, but only because of some highly specialized skills I have. If I took a developer job in a completely different technology stack it would be hard to keep my senior developer title and senior developer salary. I assume I would take a 30-40% pay cut to take a job in technologies I am not an expert in. I also assume I could get that pay back in under 5 years; probably under 3. The first time I went from $65k to $130k it took 4 years, so I see little reason why I couldn't reach a similar salary as I have now in a few years. I am a firm belever that any skilled developer can reach an expert level of skill in any area within 3 years.
Without some really strong evidence, why would anyone believe these 4 million new members aren't 99% AI-controlled bots? Or at least 99% of the new female users.
You mean some sort of theoretical future problem means we have to drop everything, abandon our successful economy, and adopt socialism IMMEDIATELY, without any debate? Yeah, sure.
I said nothing of the sort. First off, every country including the United States have socialist programs. In the United States these include social security, Medicare, police and fire departments, postal service, and many others. Most of the solutions for the almost certain economic changes brought on my improved AI will include socialist programs, such as the basic income I mentioned. They will not include abandoning our successful economy, just like enacting a minimum wage, 40 hour work weeks, or social security did not require abandoning our economy. They will simply add more protections for those who are left behind during rapid economic changes.
Just a quick quiz: do you know what socialism thinks about people who don't work?
Yes, it doesn't have a single opinion on the matter. There is no single set of economic rules that define socialism. Each country that has enacted socialist programs, including the United States, define the goals of these programs uniquely.
Those who don't work won't eat, either. Socialism is about work, not lazy idlers. You don't believe me, I know, so here's an informative quote from someone who knows socialism much better than you do.
George Bernard Shaw does not speak for everyone who desires for more socialist programs worldwide. He is merely a playwright who had very poor opinions of the uneducated and poor. Anyone with such dogmatic and unforgiving opinions knows far less about how socialism can actually be used to benefit society than most people. He was a hateful bigot and elitist, nothing more. If I gathered quotes of capitalists in the 1800's advocating slavery would that somehow show that capitalism is hopelessly flawed?
For a person to become economically unviable a few things have to happen. 1) A machine has to match or exceed a typical worker's productivity AND flexibility AND trainability. 2) The machine has to be produced at such a low cost that the capital costs can be amortized over a very small number of units produced, possibly as small as 1. 3) There has to be no other economically valuable activity available to people replaced by automation. 4) There has to be no regulation restricting the use or application of automation.
Once again, AI does not have to be more capable than humans to be dangerous. It just has to be good enough that it empowers more educated and/or wealthier humans to be productive enough that most humans hold an economic value so low they cannot maintain a living wage. We already see that happening today. The middle class is shrinking, but not just because everyone is getting poorer. In fact, of the 11% of households leaving the middle class over the last 45 years only 36% of them became poor. The only 64% became upper middle class or higher.
Those 7% of households that left the middle class for an even better lifestyle show how beneficial increased technology can be for society. But it also increases the gaps between those with significant economic value and those with very little. Advanced in AI will only make this problem worse.
You will almost certainly need plenty of human workers for your manufacturing company for decades to come for the many reasons you provided. But if your company behaves like most successful manufacturing companies, you will need much less human labor in the coming decades (as a percentage of your income that is, you may still grow your payroll if your company becomes much bigger). Many if not most employees still on your payroll will see their pay increase much faster than inflation, but many more fellow citizens will be put out of work.
Even if [AI can make most workers obsolete], people can simply artificially make automation economically unviable via legislation.
Seeing as how legislation has only made income inequality worse over the past few decades, I have next to zero confidence that legislation will stop companies from automating away jobs. I find it far more likely that a basic income will be eventually enacted as an alternative to the social unrest that would accompany a massive number of unemployable citizens.
That's already happened a few times [...] The replacement of human labor with machines has been a continuous process for over a thousand years, peaking about 200 years ago.
There are at least two things that are likely to make this time different (obviously no one knows for sure)
This change in the workforce will be much faster than previous ones. We are already starting to see this happen now, and in my opinion it is almost the sole reason the middle class is shrinking in the US (when not accompanied by market forces agnostic income redistribution that is). The loss of agricultural jobs happened gradually over more than a 50 year period. Other labor shifts in the industrial revolution happened even slower than that. Advanced in AI (even ignoring Strong AI) have the opportunity to disrupt industries in under 10 years. The two situations are hardly comparable.
Previous changes in the workforce involved removing manual labor jobs. This disrupted the economy for two species that relied on these jobs: humans and horses. Humans had the cognitive ability to find new jobs to do, while horses were almost completely removed from our economy. The intelligence difference between humans and horses is very drastic and obvious. The difference in capability between the top 20% of our workforce and the bottom 80% is tiny by comparison, but still real.
The danger is not AI becoming smarter than 80% of humans. The danger is AI empowering the top 20% enough that the bottom 80% no longer have economic value. No one knows what the actual percentages of haves and have nots will be, but considering the top 10% of earners today make 50% of the income I am guessing the percentage of people who gain from an AI-enhanced economy will be very small (sub-10%).
Perhaps this will not happen, but it is certainly a likely scenario. Saying it will never happen just because society weathered the industrial revolution well is intellectually lazy.
But would you like to be a butler? And what would it pay?
Just like today, the lowest end service jobs will probably not be very desirable. But they will put food on the table for those who would otherwise not have economic value to society.
We are at least 50 years off from strong AI as in human level common sense about the world.
The focus on dangers of creating strong AI is the worst part of current AI hysteria. Strong AI will most likely come decades or even centuries after modern day AI has massively reshaped our workforce and society in general.
The AI we should be worried about include self driving cars, natural language processing, pattern recognition, and robotics. These technologies could combine to make a majority of humans unemployable. The don't do this by making humans unnecessary. They do it by making certain humans so productive that average people have no economic value. It is AI's ability to empower the most educated in our society that is the greatest "problem".
This could either lead to a utopian world if we can enact a form of basic income for everyone, or a very distopian world if we allow income inequality to grow unchecked. Unlike strong AI which most researchers agree has a very low chance of occurring soon, the AI systems I am referring to are almost guaranteed to massively disrupt our economy in the next few decades.
The US Massacred civilians in Vietnam every day by napalm bombing their towns and villages. If it is important for you that this happened over a course of time and not on a single day... that was not clear from your post.
Most of the civilians massacred in the Vietnam war were killed by the Communist forces, not weapons like Napalm. Total civilian deaths caused by US / South Vietnam total between 50,000 and 70,000, while total civilian deaths caused by North Vietnamese forces totaled 360,000 to 720,000. Literally ten times as many. This is the difference between the morality of modern nations and the 3rd world.
And again, 6000 civilian deaths per year in Vietnam is nothing compared to the bombing campaigns in WW2. And considering Vietnamese were fighting a guerrilla war, you would think civilian deaths would have been much higher in Vietnam. Using civilians as human shields tends to cause civilian deaths.
1st world nations continue to improve though, and I doubt that will change any time soon. Napalm for instance is another weapon no longer used the same way as it was in Vietnam.
Or are we going to claim that every person who connects to a Windows server is a Windows user?
Can you imagine the extra licensing costs if companies like Microsoft or Oracle started counting users this way? We would have the world's first trillion dollar companies.
Heh... Both are right. If you're talking overall desktop users, no, they didn't meet that metric. If you're talking users wherein the usage matters little...the engineer is also right on that score- and they sledgehammered the numbers.
They are not both right. Counting tablets or even IoT devices that use Ubuntu is a reasonable redefinition of a Ubuntu user. Counting everyone who uses a service that a user of Ubuntu provides is ridiculous. It would be like saying I shop at Walmart because I bought a hamburger from a cashier who bought her shoes at Walmart.
Apparently you missed the "even close to the scale of nuking cities" part. Not sure how many times the US killed millions of civilians in a single encounter in any of those countries. There will always be cases of civilian deaths in wartime, whether by accident or by small groups of soldiers acting out. The worst thing the US military has done in those wars that I can think of is the My Lai Massacre, and at most 500 civilians dead in that encounter (more likely closer to 400). That is 3-4 orders of magnitude less atrocious than a nuclear bomb.
I'm not sure if there is any way to put large numbers of soldiers in such a stressful situation and never have them act out. Civilian deaths, and soldiers treating civilians as combatants, becomes far more likely during guerrilla wars like Vietnam. I doubt any advancements in society will stop these minor atrocities from happening in warfare until warfare is done away with all together.
"Faulting the use of nuclear bombs 60 years ago is similar to faulting men like Jefferson for owning slaves."
Similar in that both actions are morally reprehensible and inexcusable? Your demonetization of japan is simply a rationalization for america unnecessarily murdering millions with atomic bombs. The only country ever to do so.
I never made this claim. My claim was that acceptable treatment of civilians in warfare has changed since 1945, just like acceptable treatment of minority races has changed since 1800. People who lived hundreds of years ago were not inhuman monsters for having slaves; they were a product of their times. I also do not think individual Japanese or Nazi soldiers were evil men simply because their indoctrination caused them to do horrible things.
I think the usage of nuclear weapons by the United States was unfortunate, but not out of character for any of the nations involved in WWII (or for major nations in the 1000's of years prior). Trying to characterize the United States as the good guys and the Axis as the bad guys is a lazy way of looking at history, even if this war was a rare case where that simplistic narrative was mostly true. Carpet bombing civilian areas to break the will to fight was not a new or original tactic. It simply became more effective with improved technology. Not until the Geneva Convention did nations start to agree this was not an acceptable way to wage war.
But we were expecting the soviets to target cities in late 50s with bombers and missiles, hence the Nike Hercules program
From my understanding, the Nike Hercules program started as a defense against jet bombers in general, not long range nuclear bombers specifically. By the late 1950's there was a real threat of Russian nuclear weapons being used against the US homeland, but not in 1956 when the document in question was written (other than easy targets like Alaska and the Northwestern US). I could be wrong though.
That is an assumption that you are making. As you stated, we are not fighting nation states, but we are fighting a political ideology that is promoted by several terrorist organizations and lots of self-radicalized individuals.
People forget we were fighting a very religiously radicalized country in WWII as well. ISIS atrocities are hardly even comparable to those committed by Japan during WWII. Japan killed millions of Asians, perhaps even over 10 million (estimates vary). Their fanaticism rose to the level not only mass murder of civilians but also suicide bombing.
I agree I can only make assumptions, but history shows even fanatics can be beaten into submission by a determined enough enemy.
That said, I think it would be unthinkable for the United States to do whatever it takes to defeat Islamic terrorism for good. Perhaps hundreds of millions would ultimately need to be killed this time. The United States would become the great Satan their enemies already think they are. My only point was that tactics used by the United States in the 1940's, and apparently had plans to do in the 1950's, are from a different time when the targeting of civilians was treated differently than today. Faulting the use of nuclear bombs 60 years ago is similar to faulting men like Jefferson for owning slaves.
Atrocities and genocides have been happening in war torn areas of the world right up to the present day; it's just that nobody reads the news anymore.
I am not aware of military atrocities even close to the scale of nuking cities committed by western nations, let alone the United States, in the past 50 years. And I do read the news.
If the West gets into a total war situation again, you'll see the same atrocities that happened in WWII and WWI re-enacted on a grand scale.
I guess my point is that the US of 1945 would have nuked Vietnam, but the US of 1960 did not. The US was not in total war against a country threatening invasion in either situation, but the tactics used were very different.
When the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, they were arguably no longer in a total war situation with Japan. They simply needed to get a crippled country to completely capitulate. Going after primarily civilian targets like Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not the type of tactics the western world uses anymore to get enemies to surrender. We don't even carpet bomb cities with standard munitions like we did in both Japan and Germany after the outcomes of both wars were decided.
of course cities would be targeted in all out nuclear war
This document isn't about an all out nuclear war. This is describing what a nuclear country would do to a country that could not effectively retaliate with nuclear weapons. In 1956 the US still had a massive nuclear advantage and far more access to air strips that could hit the heart of the USSR. There were no intercontinental missiles or nuclear equipped submarines on either side yet.
Eventually it made sense for the US to target civilian centers as part of mutually assured destruction. But in 1956 the United States using nuclear weapons on Russian non-military targets would have been little different than them using nuclear weapons on Iraq in the 90's.
Slashdot Mirror
Quick back of napkin calculations:
Population Of US Adults: 245,630,000Ã--$10,000
= $2.4563e12
Please do tell about all the savings.
Considering you didn't read anything I wrote, I will restate that my calculations only included working age adults and assumes only the bottom two quintiles will receive a net $10k increase in income from a basic income. The next two quintiles will pay approximately $10k extra in taxes to counteract their $10k basic income, and the top quintile pays for the bottom 40%.
This is why only $8e9 income is required. And since at least $5e9 in existing welfare and police state could be reduced, the net increase in income taxes would likely be closer to $3e9.
Just using quick back of napkin calculations, if you enacted a $10k / year basic income for all adults you could get rid of almost all welfare programs.
I'm not sure how that works. $10K/year is about 2/3 of minimum wage, and plenty of people making more than that are still on some kind of assistance. Even in a two-parent home with both parents getting $10K each, it's going to be very tight.
The goal of a basic income is not to allow everyone to not work. It is to allow people to live a comfortable life even if their economic value is less than minimum wage. How many jobs could be created if maids could work for $4/hour because they get 50% of their income from a basic income? How many fewer jobs would go overseas if factory workers could have a comfortable life making only $8 per hour? I sure would find a neighbor to split the costs of a full time housekeeper to work 20 hours per week at each house for $500 per month. Beats only getting one cleaning per month for $200, but no laundry or dishes done.
Basic income's end goal is to create more economic opportunity by not eliminating jobs simply because they are not valuable enough to pay a living wage. A whole new category of service level jobs could open up that would have once been far too expensive if everyone needed to be paid minimum wage. You also remove the perverse incentive of needing to work multiple jobs just to put food on the table.
Now that's just silly. $100/day for daycare? That's more than twice the U.S. national average and closer to about 5 times what most people actually pay.
That is for two kids (a toddler and infant), and it is in one of the priciest neighborhoods in Illinois. In this area, even the cheapest daycares where few of the teachers are college educated and ratios are at the state minimum are almost $1500 per month for an infant. I pay $1700 for an infant and $1500 for a toddler. Infants have a state mandated 1:4 teacher:infant ratio, but the ratio is 1:10 for 3 year olds. So parents with infants and toddlers pay far more than the national averages.
Parents without means generally pay far less for a neighborhood stay at home parent or family member to watch their kids. This likely costs around half as much as a licensed day care center, but kids in these types of settings perform moderately worse in school even after adjusting for socio-economic factors.
I sure hope they don't mess it up and give further ammunition to those who are against basic income in the US. I personally think implementing a basic income is a no-brainer, but it has some stiff political hurdles to overcome.
Just using quick back of napkin calculations, if you enacted a $10k / year basic income for all adults you could get rid of almost all welfare programs. In the US local, state, and federal governments pay $512 billion in general welfare, unemployment, and housing. The $212.7 billion spent on police and prisons could also be reduced. Seeing a combined $500 billion in savings is a very reasonable estimate.
Today about 20% of the population pays almost all the federal taxes, the next 40% pay next to nothing, and the next 40% get money back. Using a similar formula for paying for basic income, the top quintile would pay for the benefits of the bottom two quintiles. The other two quintiles would have their taxes raised on average the same amount as the basic income. 20% of the payments would come from increased corporate income taxes (the same proportion of federal income taxes they already pay).
The bottom two quintiles include 80 million working age adults. This would require $800 billion in increased taxes to pay for. Considering society would save at least $500 billion in other taxes, this is reduced to $300 billion. I'm convinced there would be further savings, but for arguments sake lets just stick with a $300 billion price tag. This is a 17.5% increase in taxes to corporations and the top quintile of earners (roughly households with over $110k incomes). Even if we couldn't find a way to make corporations pay more, it would be a 21% tax increase on just the top quintile of earners.
I make a little over $200k per year and pay a little under $30k in federal taxes. I would gladly pay another $400 per month in taxes to enact a $10k basic income (technically $1200 more taxes per month with an $800 basic income). This would probably greatly decrease the costs of low-skill labor intensive expenses I have like the $3200 per month I spend on daycare, so it could be virtually free for many high earners.
Even if we had to increase the deficit $300 billion per year until the benefits of a basic income were felt by the economy, it would be a better use of stimulus than the almost $1 trillion given out since the 2008 crash.
You can easily find several news stories about glassholes being beaten and even sent to hospitals. However, I cannot find a single story about someone being arrested for assaulting a glasshole.
You are sadly correct that most assholes who break laws are never caught. Especially for minor crimes like muggings and robberies. The good thing is most people are not assholes, which is why the vast majority of Google Glass wearers were never assaulted.
This has happened before when simple humans were faced by humans augmented by automation
Other than slavery and sweat shops, I'm not sure what you are referring to here.
I've been waiting on AI to start disrupting Jobs for a decade now. As far as I know Amazon's Technical Turks are still profitable.
If you haven't seen AI disrupting jobs, you haven't been looking very hard. The average U.S. factory worker is responsible today for more than $180,000 of annual output, triple the $60,000 in 1972. "We're able to produce twice as much manufacturing output today as in the 1970's, with about seven million fewer workers. In many industries, the increase in productivity has exceeded Perry’s estimates. 'Thirty years ago, it took ten hours per worker to produce one ton of steel,' said U.S. Steel CEO John Surma in 2011. 'Today, it takes two hours.'"
Not all of this is AI, but a great deal of it is. Robotics and improved operations is the primary cause of this rise in productivity, and the industry isn't done improving yet.
the problem is when the bottom 80% get pissed enough to start a revolution. the top 20% then better hope they have enough killbots to subdue it.
The US already has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. With 4.4% of the world's population, we house about 22% of the world's prisoners. This is arguably only necessary because of the high levels of social inequality in the United States.
You don't need killbots for the entire 80% of the population. You just need a way for 60% of the population to think 20% of the population is a danger to them. The 60% will then gladly give up some freedoms to keep themselves safe from those dangerous elements.
The USA shrinking middle class is definitely not due to automation. Otherwise it would be far worse in Australia where we enforce a high minimum wage
First off, the majority of the shrinking middle class is in the direction of households rising above the middle class. So its more likely that countries with a constant middle class are ones which create barriers preventing households from become more prosperous. Combine expensive social programs paid for with taxes on the upper class and social programs that prevent people from being poor, and you have a large middle class event despite market forces that would normally have shrunk the middle class. I'm not saying this is a bad thing (although I like a basic income far more than minimum wages) but whenever a country increases socialist programs they will diminish the effects of market forces on their economy.
Australia will be one of (if not the) first country to experience automation replacement due to our high wages, USA will lag behind many countries due to the pathetic slave wages allowed.
This could be, but countries whose upper class have more money will also have more capital to spend on automation. Its hard to tell which market forces will cause more rapid adoption of automation.
OK, let's get this straight: a butler is not a "low-end service job". A butler is equivalent to the CEO of a small company, and should be paid commensurately. If you think it's all about answering the door and serving the dinner, you're thinking of a housekeeper, which is something else entirely.
If you demand to use old British definitions of terms then a housekeeper is simply the female version of a butler. Perhaps you meant a maid or hall boy.
Because households large enough to have a large retinue of domestic workers is rare in modern times, a butler rarely describes the type of position you are referring to. At least in the US. Since the OP said he couldn't wait for his butler, it is clear he meant a butler that would work for an upper middle class professional family. In this case the butler is usually either the only domestic worker or perhaps one of two (with a nanny being the most common second worker).
In this situation, a butler is nothing like a CEO of a small company. It is mostly a combination of maid and personal assistant.
Why mod this down? It's fairly accurate. As a 20 year veteran in the field I really do understand where the article poster is coming from and as a 20 year old veteran I also know where the OP of this thread is coming from.
It was modded down because it didn't do anything other than insult the article poster. You provided enough substance to start an actual discussion, but the original AC just acted like a troll.
Not to say that people over the age of 40 can't move in the technical world but it's difficult and if pay is a question then it's that much harder.
This is quite true, especially the last part about pay. I am higher paid than most of my coworkers, but only because of some highly specialized skills I have. If I took a developer job in a completely different technology stack it would be hard to keep my senior developer title and senior developer salary. I assume I would take a 30-40% pay cut to take a job in technologies I am not an expert in. I also assume I could get that pay back in under 5 years; probably under 3. The first time I went from $65k to $130k it took 4 years, so I see little reason why I couldn't reach a similar salary as I have now in a few years. I am a firm belever that any skilled developer can reach an expert level of skill in any area within 3 years.
Without some really strong evidence, why would anyone believe these 4 million new members aren't 99% AI-controlled bots? Or at least 99% of the new female users.
You mean some sort of theoretical future problem means we have to drop everything, abandon our successful economy, and adopt socialism IMMEDIATELY, without any debate? Yeah, sure.
I said nothing of the sort. First off, every country including the United States have socialist programs. In the United States these include social security, Medicare, police and fire departments, postal service, and many others. Most of the solutions for the almost certain economic changes brought on my improved AI will include socialist programs, such as the basic income I mentioned. They will not include abandoning our successful economy, just like enacting a minimum wage, 40 hour work weeks, or social security did not require abandoning our economy. They will simply add more protections for those who are left behind during rapid economic changes.
Just a quick quiz: do you know what socialism thinks about people who don't work?
Yes, it doesn't have a single opinion on the matter. There is no single set of economic rules that define socialism. Each country that has enacted socialist programs, including the United States, define the goals of these programs uniquely.
Those who don't work won't eat, either. Socialism is about work, not lazy idlers. You don't believe me, I know, so here's an informative quote from someone who knows socialism much better than you do.
George Bernard Shaw does not speak for everyone who desires for more socialist programs worldwide. He is merely a playwright who had very poor opinions of the uneducated and poor. Anyone with such dogmatic and unforgiving opinions knows far less about how socialism can actually be used to benefit society than most people. He was a hateful bigot and elitist, nothing more. If I gathered quotes of capitalists in the 1800's advocating slavery would that somehow show that capitalism is hopelessly flawed?
For a person to become economically unviable a few things have to happen. 1) A machine has to match or exceed a typical worker's productivity AND flexibility AND trainability. 2) The machine has to be produced at such a low cost that the capital costs can be amortized over a very small number of units produced, possibly as small as 1. 3) There has to be no other economically valuable activity available to people replaced by automation. 4) There has to be no regulation restricting the use or application of automation.
Once again, AI does not have to be more capable than humans to be dangerous. It just has to be good enough that it empowers more educated and/or wealthier humans to be productive enough that most humans hold an economic value so low they cannot maintain a living wage. We already see that happening today. The middle class is shrinking, but not just because everyone is getting poorer. In fact, of the 11% of households leaving the middle class over the last 45 years only 36% of them became poor. The only 64% became upper middle class or higher.
Those 7% of households that left the middle class for an even better lifestyle show how beneficial increased technology can be for society. But it also increases the gaps between those with significant economic value and those with very little. Advanced in AI will only make this problem worse.
You will almost certainly need plenty of human workers for your manufacturing company for decades to come for the many reasons you provided. But if your company behaves like most successful manufacturing companies, you will need much less human labor in the coming decades (as a percentage of your income that is, you may still grow your payroll if your company becomes much bigger). Many if not most employees still on your payroll will see their pay increase much faster than inflation, but many more fellow citizens will be put out of work.
Even if [AI can make most workers obsolete], people can simply artificially make automation economically unviable via legislation.
Seeing as how legislation has only made income inequality worse over the past few decades, I have next to zero confidence that legislation will stop companies from automating away jobs. I find it far more likely that a basic income will be eventually enacted as an alternative to the social unrest that would accompany a massive number of unemployable citizens.
That's already happened a few times [...] The replacement of human labor with machines has been a continuous process for over a thousand years, peaking about 200 years ago.
There are at least two things that are likely to make this time different (obviously no one knows for sure)
This change in the workforce will be much faster than previous ones. We are already starting to see this happen now, and in my opinion it is almost the sole reason the middle class is shrinking in the US (when not accompanied by market forces agnostic income redistribution that is). The loss of agricultural jobs happened gradually over more than a 50 year period. Other labor shifts in the industrial revolution happened even slower than that. Advanced in AI (even ignoring Strong AI) have the opportunity to disrupt industries in under 10 years. The two situations are hardly comparable.
Previous changes in the workforce involved removing manual labor jobs. This disrupted the economy for two species that relied on these jobs: humans and horses. Humans had the cognitive ability to find new jobs to do, while horses were almost completely removed from our economy. The intelligence difference between humans and horses is very drastic and obvious. The difference in capability between the top 20% of our workforce and the bottom 80% is tiny by comparison, but still real.
The danger is not AI becoming smarter than 80% of humans. The danger is AI empowering the top 20% enough that the bottom 80% no longer have economic value. No one knows what the actual percentages of haves and have nots will be, but considering the top 10% of earners today make 50% of the income I am guessing the percentage of people who gain from an AI-enhanced economy will be very small (sub-10%).
Perhaps this will not happen, but it is certainly a likely scenario. Saying it will never happen just because society weathered the industrial revolution well is intellectually lazy.
But would you like to be a butler? And what would it pay?
Just like today, the lowest end service jobs will probably not be very desirable. But they will put food on the table for those who would otherwise not have economic value to society.
We are at least 50 years off from strong AI as in human level common sense about the world.
The focus on dangers of creating strong AI is the worst part of current AI hysteria. Strong AI will most likely come decades or even centuries after modern day AI has massively reshaped our workforce and society in general.
The AI we should be worried about include self driving cars, natural language processing, pattern recognition, and robotics. These technologies could combine to make a majority of humans unemployable. The don't do this by making humans unnecessary. They do it by making certain humans so productive that average people have no economic value. It is AI's ability to empower the most educated in our society that is the greatest "problem".
This could either lead to a utopian world if we can enact a form of basic income for everyone, or a very distopian world if we allow income inequality to grow unchecked. Unlike strong AI which most researchers agree has a very low chance of occurring soon, the AI systems I am referring to are almost guaranteed to massively disrupt our economy in the next few decades.
The US Massacred civilians in Vietnam every day by napalm bombing their towns and villages. ... that was not clear from your post.
If it is important for you that this happened over a course of time and not on a single day
Most of the civilians massacred in the Vietnam war were killed by the Communist forces, not weapons like Napalm. Total civilian deaths caused by US / South Vietnam total between 50,000 and 70,000, while total civilian deaths caused by North Vietnamese forces totaled 360,000 to 720,000. Literally ten times as many. This is the difference between the morality of modern nations and the 3rd world.
And again, 6000 civilian deaths per year in Vietnam is nothing compared to the bombing campaigns in WW2. And considering Vietnamese were fighting a guerrilla war, you would think civilian deaths would have been much higher in Vietnam. Using civilians as human shields tends to cause civilian deaths.
1st world nations continue to improve though, and I doubt that will change any time soon. Napalm for instance is another weapon no longer used the same way as it was in Vietnam.
Or are we going to claim that every person who connects to a Windows server is a Windows user?
Can you imagine the extra licensing costs if companies like Microsoft or Oracle started counting users this way? We would have the world's first trillion dollar companies.
Heh... Both are right. If you're talking overall desktop users, no, they didn't meet that metric. If you're talking users wherein the usage matters little...the engineer is also right on that score- and they sledgehammered the numbers.
They are not both right. Counting tablets or even IoT devices that use Ubuntu is a reasonable redefinition of a Ubuntu user. Counting everyone who uses a service that a user of Ubuntu provides is ridiculous. It would be like saying I shop at Walmart because I bought a hamburger from a cashier who bought her shoes at Walmart.
Apparently you missed the "even close to the scale of nuking cities" part. Not sure how many times the US killed millions of civilians in a single encounter in any of those countries. There will always be cases of civilian deaths in wartime, whether by accident or by small groups of soldiers acting out. The worst thing the US military has done in those wars that I can think of is the My Lai Massacre, and at most 500 civilians dead in that encounter (more likely closer to 400). That is 3-4 orders of magnitude less atrocious than a nuclear bomb.
I'm not sure if there is any way to put large numbers of soldiers in such a stressful situation and never have them act out. Civilian deaths, and soldiers treating civilians as combatants, becomes far more likely during guerrilla wars like Vietnam. I doubt any advancements in society will stop these minor atrocities from happening in warfare until warfare is done away with all together.
Similar in that both actions are morally reprehensible and inexcusable? Your demonetization of japan is simply a rationalization for america unnecessarily murdering millions with atomic bombs. The only country ever to do so.
I never made this claim. My claim was that acceptable treatment of civilians in warfare has changed since 1945, just like acceptable treatment of minority races has changed since 1800. People who lived hundreds of years ago were not inhuman monsters for having slaves; they were a product of their times. I also do not think individual Japanese or Nazi soldiers were evil men simply because their indoctrination caused them to do horrible things.
I think the usage of nuclear weapons by the United States was unfortunate, but not out of character for any of the nations involved in WWII (or for major nations in the 1000's of years prior). Trying to characterize the United States as the good guys and the Axis as the bad guys is a lazy way of looking at history, even if this war was a rare case where that simplistic narrative was mostly true. Carpet bombing civilian areas to break the will to fight was not a new or original tactic. It simply became more effective with improved technology. Not until the Geneva Convention did nations start to agree this was not an acceptable way to wage war.
But we were expecting the soviets to target cities in late 50s with bombers and missiles, hence the Nike Hercules program
From my understanding, the Nike Hercules program started as a defense against jet bombers in general, not long range nuclear bombers specifically. By the late 1950's there was a real threat of Russian nuclear weapons being used against the US homeland, but not in 1956 when the document in question was written (other than easy targets like Alaska and the Northwestern US). I could be wrong though.
That is an assumption that you are making. As you stated, we are not fighting nation states, but we are fighting a political ideology that is promoted by several terrorist organizations and lots of self-radicalized individuals.
People forget we were fighting a very religiously radicalized country in WWII as well. ISIS atrocities are hardly even comparable to those committed by Japan during WWII. Japan killed millions of Asians, perhaps even over 10 million (estimates vary). Their fanaticism rose to the level not only mass murder of civilians but also suicide bombing.
I agree I can only make assumptions, but history shows even fanatics can be beaten into submission by a determined enough enemy.
That said, I think it would be unthinkable for the United States to do whatever it takes to defeat Islamic terrorism for good. Perhaps hundreds of millions would ultimately need to be killed this time. The United States would become the great Satan their enemies already think they are. My only point was that tactics used by the United States in the 1940's, and apparently had plans to do in the 1950's, are from a different time when the targeting of civilians was treated differently than today. Faulting the use of nuclear bombs 60 years ago is similar to faulting men like Jefferson for owning slaves.
Atrocities and genocides have been happening in war torn areas of the world right up to the present day; it's just that nobody reads the news anymore.
I am not aware of military atrocities even close to the scale of nuking cities committed by western nations, let alone the United States, in the past 50 years. And I do read the news.
If the West gets into a total war situation again, you'll see the same atrocities that happened in WWII and WWI re-enacted on a grand scale.
I guess my point is that the US of 1945 would have nuked Vietnam, but the US of 1960 did not. The US was not in total war against a country threatening invasion in either situation, but the tactics used were very different.
When the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, they were arguably no longer in a total war situation with Japan. They simply needed to get a crippled country to completely capitulate. Going after primarily civilian targets like Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not the type of tactics the western world uses anymore to get enemies to surrender. We don't even carpet bomb cities with standard munitions like we did in both Japan and Germany after the outcomes of both wars were decided.
of course cities would be targeted in all out nuclear war
This document isn't about an all out nuclear war. This is describing what a nuclear country would do to a country that could not effectively retaliate with nuclear weapons. In 1956 the US still had a massive nuclear advantage and far more access to air strips that could hit the heart of the USSR. There were no intercontinental missiles or nuclear equipped submarines on either side yet.
Eventually it made sense for the US to target civilian centers as part of mutually assured destruction. But in 1956 the United States using nuclear weapons on Russian non-military targets would have been little different than them using nuclear weapons on Iraq in the 90's.