Since we're talking about another wave of automation advances that has happened in the 21st century, I don't see much relevance to a century ago.
Well, so far you have provided no evidence at all for any of your claims. I'm just pointing out that automation has never led to job losses and that I don't know of any plausible mechanism by which it would lead to job losses.
I guess you slept through that whole jobless recovery thing.
How can the recovery have been "jobless" if there are more jobs than ever before?
How did that Democratic hero put it? "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."
Has it struck you that I might actually care about helping the less fortunate? Did it occur to you that I wasn't actually advocating specific programs you dislike?
Of course you care. You can't have any significant and successful ideology without people caring. Whether it's socialists, monarchists, eugenicists, Marxists, fascists, or theocrats, they all care and they all have good intentions.
Have you noticed that people start unequal,
I haven't just noticed it, I experienced it.
so that treating them as you would equals, and doing nothing more, perpetuates inequality?
Oh, there are many government interventions that end inequality; again, I know that first hand. Unfortunately, they also end justice, liberty, meritocracy, economic opportunity, and economic growth.
Man, you're pulling lots of stuff out of your ass and trying to attach it to me.
You've been quite clear about who you are, haven't you? A "white cisgender upper-middle-class straight guy" who "cares", has the best of intentions, and advocates using government to help those "less fortunate".
That is, I imagine you understand better vs. worse if you give it a moment's thought.
As I was saying, by objective measures of quality of life and economic well-being that I know of, jobs and life have been getting better over the last 100 years, in large part due to automation. That also agrees with my personal observations over many decades in multiple countries.
So, if you need to think things are otherwise, you need to define what you mean by "better" and "worse". Of course, progressives and social democrats both complain of the supposed "loss of good jobs" and believe that people ought to be less materialistic and more in touch with nature. Perhaps "swimming in pig excrement for $0.10/h" does actually represent your notion of a "better job". I simply don't know, and I can't guess what's going on in your head or what your preferences are.
Look around you. If you'll quit plugging your ears and shouting LA LA LA, you'll see the evidence.
I have looked around me, as well as around Asia and Europe (where I have also lived), and I see increasing living standards over time (by the usual measures used in economics) both in other countries and in the US. That's also born out by statistics.
Where is your evidence that jobs lost to automation are replaced by better jobs?
Since you still haven't stated clearly what you mean by "better job" and why your measure is valid, it is impossible to present any "evidence". I mean, after all, you might seriously think that working on an iPhone assembly line is a "good job" that we ought to have more of.
That is too simplistic a stat. You have to look at the quality of the employment as well. It seems the jobs that do open up pay less than the qop that went away.
The claim that we were discussing is that jobs permanently disappear, not that they become lower quality. We have seen that that claim is demostrably false.
Now you are making new and different claims, namely that the "quality" of jobs is declining, that jobs "pay less", and that "living standards are declining". What measures of "quality of jobs" or "pay" or "living standards" are you using and why are those valid measures? Where is the evidence that increased automation causes the quality of jobs to decline, or jobs to pay less, or living standards to decline? And what plausible mechanism is there by which automation would cause those measures to decline, and where is the evidence for that mechanism? You're just echoing FUD you hear from politicians and ideologues.
It would seem reality disagrees with you. Where are these re-allocated jobs you speak of? Even the workers that got the jobs that went overseas are now getting replaced by robots.
No, reality disagrees with you, since more people in the US are employed today than ever before in history. So, obviously, jobs aren't disappearing.
If we're talking about U.S.A. politics and economics, ignorance is a must.
So, save yourself a lot of trouble by not trolling American political discussions. After all, I don't go to European or Canadian websites and participate in their discussions. I figure every nation has the right to go to hell in whatever way its citizens like. Please respect ours.
If a dozen machines can replace 1000 factory workers, it won't take 1000 technicians to keep those machines running. It's basic math.
Yes, and it is also the point. Those factory workers that have been replaced by automation will be doing something different and more productive than they were doing before. That's what facts and precedents tell us.
If the economy and progress worked like you want it to, we would still have 99% of the population employed in agriculture.
but if we want to work on that we should work on halting population growth first
Already done. World population is projected to stabilize at around 11-12 billion, and it's mostly growing now because people aren't dying as much as they used to, not because people have having "too many kids".
Simple fact of the matter is, that you're not going to be training an average 45-year-old factory worker in how to write the AI for the robot that took his job.
If everybody went into the job of babysitting the AI that replaced them, automation would be pointless. The point is that that "average 45-year-old factory worker" (or programmer or whatever), is now free to do something different. He/she has some ideas on what good things to do are, but the rest of society gets to vote on what they want him to do as well. We call those votes "dollars".
The benefits are reduced costs to administer support services, eliminating negative incentives to work (UBI doesn't decrease when you work),
You can have those benefits already, by replacing our complex welfare system with a single source, means tested system. That's what welfare systems in places like Germany look like.
Everyone gets the same monthly payment, everyone pays the same tax rate. Why do you think that's not fair?
It's illusory that anything like that could be implemented in the US: there are too many lobbyists and special interests to keep both the welfare side and the tax side of the system complicated and riddled with exceptions.
True, just giving money won't solve; we assume a post-scarcity environment. That is there is abundance.
If we lived in a post-scarcity environment, we wouldn't have this discussion. Right now, we live in an environment where scarcity exists, and introducing a basic income in such an environment makes no sense.
A few landlords owning all apartments and keeping supply artificially low must be made illegal. And the items must have price controls.
Your premise is wrong there. The reason housing prices in places like San Francisco are so astronomically high is because the voters have adopted policies that make this happen; these voters are primarily single family home owners and renters. The single family home owners like to see government policies drive up the values for their properties, and the renters want to keep their rents low via rent control.
Without such controls, what you say will happen. The money will be siphoned off by the rich (1% or 0.1%).
The money will be "siphoned off" by people who make investments: institutional and individual investments. If you stop them from making a profit, it will massively hurt the economy because they will stop investing.
In south India, there is a state run PDS, public distribution system, which directly delivers food items like grains to families. It is near free. So instead of govt giving cash, it gives grains, fuel, even low cost housing.
India has massive social problems and poverty, so it hardly seems like a good example. And in the US, we have an extensive welfare system that gives people a lot more than this if they need it.
This way a stable society is maintained and there is not many without basic needs
"Maintaining a stable society [where] there is not many without basic needs" is easy: a communist agrarian society will do that for you. Of course, forget having high-tech gadgets or complex medical care or being able to travel a lot.
something which the richest and most powerful nations on earth can easily afford, and which they will inevitably have to do now that there are permanently more people than jobs.
There is no actual evidence that there are "permanently more people than jobs"; right now, any "citation" you can find for that is little more than politically self-serving FUD. If anything is putting a crimp on "jobs", it's regulations and taxes: the more expensive you make full-time employment, the more people will choose to seek other ways of making money. What are those other ways? Unreported income, the gig economy, part-time jobs, etc. That's not the fault of automation.
or you finally let go of the sickening darwinian idea that people must toil to earn their right to live even well into the age of automation and artificial intelligence
Automation and artificial intelligence don't reduce the need for jobs, they allow reallocation of labor to other projects. It's why you get iPhones and computers these days, instead of turnips and potatoes.
Keep it simple. Any company using increased mechanisation/robots/overseas-outsourcing and creating redundancies pays a percentage of savings (?50%?) each and every year towards a universal wage fund.
And they will promptly be driven out of business by a foreign company that doesn't do this. Next, you'll propose stiff tariffs on imports. Europe tried this, and it led to poverty and war, which is why it has fallen out of favor. Even if it didn't it would simply drive up prices to the point where everybody is poorer and it's a universal tax. If you want to implement universal income, you can't do it by a tax on the rich or a "tax on companies", you have to do it by a tax on the entire working population.
From my point of view, people generally treat me as they should, and everyone should be treated the same. In fact, lots of people aren't, because they differ from me in sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or something like that.
Would you want to work for someone who hates and despises you for who you are, but employs you only because they'd face big penalties for firing you? Because I sure don't, but these non-discrimination laws deprive me of the ability to choose. You think the people supposedly protected by these laws are so far beneath you that they'd rather spend several years in court suing over discrimination (followed by never getting hired again) instead of just picking up again and looking for another job, which is what you would do? You want to force minorities to help racists and homophobes to become wealthy by depriving them of the ability to find out what their bosses are really thinking? You want to force a gay baker to serve Bill Donohue after Prop 8?
So, we need programs to help people who need it. Not necessarily programs to help people in generally needy classes, but it's really hard to tell what help individuals need, and it's a lot easier to go by statistics.
Who is this "we"? I've never met you, and obviously, to you, I'm just a "statistic", like a member of a sick herd of cattle that needs some treatment and extra feed. Don't kid yourself: your political decisions are personal: you want certain government programs, out of a mix of economic self-interest, fear about the likely social decline of your kids, appearing "caring to the less fortunate" to your social circle, and getting people who make you uncomfortable out of your sight.
I'm a white cisgender upper-middle-class straight guy of English and Swedish descent, and I haven't deliberately studied problems less privileged people are having, so I can't got into details without mansplaining.
Well, then you should perhaps have the decency of refraining from coming up with solutions for others or imposing policies on them through government force. The best way of helping others is to just live by your words and actually treat them as equals, not as statistics, not as recipients of your largesse, and not as trophies to your social justice virtues. By all means, seek out minorities as resources to recruit from and do business with, but don't do that out of charity, do it only if it is an actual business opportunity. Voting for rich token-minority politicians promising to pass ineffective laws with grandiose sounding objectives and spread money around, on the other hand, is lazy on your part and says that you neither understand nor really care.
Hint: who said anything about "anchoring" to the desk?
If the GPU is inside the 5K display, it's "anchored to the desk", since 5K displays aren't portable.
And this may be more about 5K (go ahead, see what's available right now even from a desktop, yeah, that's right, even the cables only support 4K!)
High resolution monitors have been around for a while: they simply divide the display into multiple regions and treat them as separate monitors.
VR headsets, of course, have two displays to begin with and people are itching to go to two 4K displays at 90Hz, which actually requires more compute power than a 5K display at desktop refresh rates.
Apple's thinking is likely that if it integrates a GPU capable of driving a 5K resolution into the display itself, it won't have to worry about trying to balance graphics performance with thin and light designs for its future Mac systems.
Anchoring the GPU to the desk may be entirely the wrong choice now: there will likely be a lot of demand for portable high performance GPUs from VR headsets.
Treating people as individuals is the ideal, but when you're dealing with a white guy whose parents put him through college and a black guy who was
Doesn't it strike you as odd that in the same sentence, you deny the need to treat people individually, and then give examples involving two individuals (and prejudicial and stereotyped ones at that)? It seems you already understand that it doesn't make sense to talk about individuals in terms of class membership. To continue your example, what about a white immigrant who worked his way through college vs a black guy whose parents were rich and privileged doctors and lawyers? You're still going to tell the white immigrant to "check his privilege" and that he is responsible for slavery in the US? Or are you going to go down the rabbit hole of intersectionality where you sit in judgment over the life history, choices, and privileges of every single individual in order to determine what government support, preferences, and protections they ought to receive?
Until people can be convinced not to treat people of different races, classes, economic standings, whatever, individually, as they deserve, the current conflicts and problems are going to continue
Well, and as more than half a century of policies rooted in progressivism and critical theory, both in the US and Europe, those policies are not very effective at delivering the kind of integration and progress they promise. We know that because there are a couple of natural experiments in which progressive politicians attempted to help some groups and ignored others. That is, in addition to being intrinsically unjust and violating individual liberties, such policies simply fail to produce the desired results in practice.
I'm not saying there is a good way of using the government to prevent or punish this
But that is one of the reasons why anti-abortion laws are intrinsically incompatible with libertarianism, even if you believe that a fetus has a "right to life". A libertarian society simply cannot guarantee a "right to life", not even for adults. Of course, neither can any other kind of society guarantee a "right to life", they merely delude themselves into thinking they can by passing one ineffective and harmful law after another.
That doesn't mean that in a libertarian society, anything goes with respect to abortion. Quite to the contrary: I would expect that in a libertarian society, many private communities, insurance plans, and other institutions would adopt rules and regulations against abortions; the difference is that you are subject to these rules by choice and mutual agreement, as opposed to having people lobby for a single rule imposed on everybody.
and you don't seem to care how much stems from Marx, or whether it stems from stuff that Marx got more or less right or stuff that he definitely got wrong. Do you think public education is a bad idea, because it is in the Communist Manifesto?
Marxism isn't a collection of policy preferences, it's a method of socioeconomic analysis. What makes Hillary and Sanders (neo-)Marxists isn't an accidental agreement with policies advocated in the Communist Manifesto, it is the way Hillary and Sanders apply that method of analysis and justify policies with them.
(In terms of individual policy preferences (e.g., isidewith.com), there is literally no difference for me between Sanders, Clinton, or Trump.)
My problem is that you seem to be condemning politics that can trace any line of heritage back to Marx
No, I condemn politics that justifies policies the way Marxists justify politics (class/group conflicts), just like I condemn politics that justifies policies based on God (theocracy), utility to race/nation (national socialism), or utility to "society" (progressivism, technocracy).
I'm a liberal, which means that I believe that policies should be justified based on individual rights, personal autonomy, and personal responsibility.
If my Googling concerning "The Right to Refuse Service" laws in the US is correct, it is not legal to refuse service outside of the law (anti-discrimination laws on multiple levels) or arbitrarily or inconsistently.
It's the other way around: you can refuse service except as specifically prohibited by law. Laws restricting the right to refuse service need to be justified based on a compelling government interest. There is certainly no compelling interest in forcing Facebook to post pictures that its users might find offensive.
If Facebook started flagging a disproportionate number of Catholic or Asian pictures as "offensive", that might be taken as evidence of illegal discrimination, but even that is not clearcut.
If it's posted on Facebook, it almost always falls into two categories: inane or offensive. So, a very simple algorithm for avoiding photos you don't want to see is... to quit Facebook.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, so far you have provided no evidence at all for any of your claims. I'm just pointing out that automation has never led to job losses and that I don't know of any plausible mechanism by which it would lead to job losses.
How can the recovery have been "jobless" if there are more jobs than ever before?
How did that Democratic hero put it? "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts."
Of course you care. You can't have any significant and successful ideology without people caring. Whether it's socialists, monarchists, eugenicists, Marxists, fascists, or theocrats, they all care and they all have good intentions.
I haven't just noticed it, I experienced it.
Oh, there are many government interventions that end inequality; again, I know that first hand. Unfortunately, they also end justice, liberty, meritocracy, economic opportunity, and economic growth.
You've been quite clear about who you are, haven't you? A "white cisgender upper-middle-class straight guy" who "cares", has the best of intentions, and advocates using government to help those "less fortunate".
As I was saying, by objective measures of quality of life and economic well-being that I know of, jobs and life have been getting better over the last 100 years, in large part due to automation. That also agrees with my personal observations over many decades in multiple countries.
So, if you need to think things are otherwise, you need to define what you mean by "better" and "worse". Of course, progressives and social democrats both complain of the supposed "loss of good jobs" and believe that people ought to be less materialistic and more in touch with nature. Perhaps "swimming in pig excrement for $0.10/h" does actually represent your notion of a "better job". I simply don't know, and I can't guess what's going on in your head or what your preferences are.
I have looked around me, as well as around Asia and Europe (where I have also lived), and I see increasing living standards over time (by the usual measures used in economics) both in other countries and in the US. That's also born out by statistics.
Since you still haven't stated clearly what you mean by "better job" and why your measure is valid, it is impossible to present any "evidence". I mean, after all, you might seriously think that working on an iPhone assembly line is a "good job" that we ought to have more of.
The claim that we were discussing is that jobs permanently disappear, not that they become lower quality. We have seen that that claim is demostrably false.
Now you are making new and different claims, namely that the "quality" of jobs is declining, that jobs "pay less", and that "living standards are declining". What measures of "quality of jobs" or "pay" or "living standards" are you using and why are those valid measures? Where is the evidence that increased automation causes the quality of jobs to decline, or jobs to pay less, or living standards to decline? And what plausible mechanism is there by which automation would cause those measures to decline, and where is the evidence for that mechanism? You're just echoing FUD you hear from politicians and ideologues.
No, reality disagrees with you, since more people in the US are employed today than ever before in history. So, obviously, jobs aren't disappearing.
So, save yourself a lot of trouble by not trolling American political discussions. After all, I don't go to European or Canadian websites and participate in their discussions. I figure every nation has the right to go to hell in whatever way its citizens like. Please respect ours.
Yes, and it is also the point. Those factory workers that have been replaced by automation will be doing something different and more productive than they were doing before. That's what facts and precedents tell us.
If the economy and progress worked like you want it to, we would still have 99% of the population employed in agriculture.
In fact, in real life, it's actually like a debit card.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But, hey, don't let utter ignorance and laziness stop you from participating in political or economic debates!
Not a shred of evidence for that.
Not a shred of evidence for that either.
Sorry, but you are a blithering idiot with apocalyptic fantasies.
but if we want to work on that we should work on halting population growth first
Already done. World population is projected to stabilize at around 11-12 billion, and it's mostly growing now because people aren't dying as much as they used to, not because people have having "too many kids".
If everybody went into the job of babysitting the AI that replaced them, automation would be pointless. The point is that that "average 45-year-old factory worker" (or programmer or whatever), is now free to do something different. He/she has some ideas on what good things to do are, but the rest of society gets to vote on what they want him to do as well. We call those votes "dollars".
You can have those benefits already, by replacing our complex welfare system with a single source, means tested system. That's what welfare systems in places like Germany look like.
It's illusory that anything like that could be implemented in the US: there are too many lobbyists and special interests to keep both the welfare side and the tax side of the system complicated and riddled with exceptions.
If we lived in a post-scarcity environment, we wouldn't have this discussion. Right now, we live in an environment where scarcity exists, and introducing a basic income in such an environment makes no sense.
Your premise is wrong there. The reason housing prices in places like San Francisco are so astronomically high is because the voters have adopted policies that make this happen; these voters are primarily single family home owners and renters. The single family home owners like to see government policies drive up the values for their properties, and the renters want to keep their rents low via rent control.
The money will be "siphoned off" by people who make investments: institutional and individual investments. If you stop them from making a profit, it will massively hurt the economy because they will stop investing.
India has massive social problems and poverty, so it hardly seems like a good example. And in the US, we have an extensive welfare system that gives people a lot more than this if they need it.
"Maintaining a stable society [where] there is not many without basic needs" is easy: a communist agrarian society will do that for you. Of course, forget having high-tech gadgets or complex medical care or being able to travel a lot.
70% is what high income earners would have to give in order to finance this. Taxes on the middle class would also have to rise sharply.
There is no actual evidence that there are "permanently more people than jobs"; right now, any "citation" you can find for that is little more than politically self-serving FUD. If anything is putting a crimp on "jobs", it's regulations and taxes: the more expensive you make full-time employment, the more people will choose to seek other ways of making money. What are those other ways? Unreported income, the gig economy, part-time jobs, etc. That's not the fault of automation.
Automation and artificial intelligence don't reduce the need for jobs, they allow reallocation of labor to other projects. It's why you get iPhones and computers these days, instead of turnips and potatoes.
And they will promptly be driven out of business by a foreign company that doesn't do this. Next, you'll propose stiff tariffs on imports. Europe tried this, and it led to poverty and war, which is why it has fallen out of favor. Even if it didn't it would simply drive up prices to the point where everybody is poorer and it's a universal tax. If you want to implement universal income, you can't do it by a tax on the rich or a "tax on companies", you have to do it by a tax on the entire working population.
Would you want to work for someone who hates and despises you for who you are, but employs you only because they'd face big penalties for firing you? Because I sure don't, but these non-discrimination laws deprive me of the ability to choose. You think the people supposedly protected by these laws are so far beneath you that they'd rather spend several years in court suing over discrimination (followed by never getting hired again) instead of just picking up again and looking for another job, which is what you would do? You want to force minorities to help racists and homophobes to become wealthy by depriving them of the ability to find out what their bosses are really thinking? You want to force a gay baker to serve Bill Donohue after Prop 8?
Who is this "we"? I've never met you, and obviously, to you, I'm just a "statistic", like a member of a sick herd of cattle that needs some treatment and extra feed. Don't kid yourself: your political decisions are personal: you want certain government programs, out of a mix of economic self-interest, fear about the likely social decline of your kids, appearing "caring to the less fortunate" to your social circle, and getting people who make you uncomfortable out of your sight.
Well, then you should perhaps have the decency of refraining from coming up with solutions for others or imposing policies on them through government force. The best way of helping others is to just live by your words and actually treat them as equals, not as statistics, not as recipients of your largesse, and not as trophies to your social justice virtues. By all means, seek out minorities as resources to recruit from and do business with, but don't do that out of charity, do it only if it is an actual business opportunity. Voting for rich token-minority politicians promising to pass ineffective laws with grandiose sounding objectives and spread money around, on the other hand, is lazy on your part and says that you neither understand nor really care.
If the GPU is inside the 5K display, it's "anchored to the desk", since 5K displays aren't portable.
High resolution monitors have been around for a while: they simply divide the display into multiple regions and treat them as separate monitors.
VR headsets, of course, have two displays to begin with and people are itching to go to two 4K displays at 90Hz, which actually requires more compute power than a 5K display at desktop refresh rates.
Anchoring the GPU to the desk may be entirely the wrong choice now: there will likely be a lot of demand for portable high performance GPUs from VR headsets.
Doesn't it strike you as odd that in the same sentence, you deny the need to treat people individually, and then give examples involving two individuals (and prejudicial and stereotyped ones at that)? It seems you already understand that it doesn't make sense to talk about individuals in terms of class membership. To continue your example, what about a white immigrant who worked his way through college vs a black guy whose parents were rich and privileged doctors and lawyers? You're still going to tell the white immigrant to "check his privilege" and that he is responsible for slavery in the US? Or are you going to go down the rabbit hole of intersectionality where you sit in judgment over the life history, choices, and privileges of every single individual in order to determine what government support, preferences, and protections they ought to receive?
Well, and as more than half a century of policies rooted in progressivism and critical theory, both in the US and Europe, those policies are not very effective at delivering the kind of integration and progress they promise. We know that because there are a couple of natural experiments in which progressive politicians attempted to help some groups and ignored others. That is, in addition to being intrinsically unjust and violating individual liberties, such policies simply fail to produce the desired results in practice.
But that is one of the reasons why anti-abortion laws are intrinsically incompatible with libertarianism, even if you believe that a fetus has a "right to life". A libertarian society simply cannot guarantee a "right to life", not even for adults. Of course, neither can any other kind of society guarantee a "right to life", they merely delude themselves into thinking they can by passing one ineffective and harmful law after another.
That doesn't mean that in a libertarian society, anything goes with respect to abortion. Quite to the contrary: I would expect that in a libertarian society, many private communities, insurance plans, and other institutions would adopt rules and regulations against abortions; the difference is that you are subject to these rules by choice and mutual agreement, as opposed to having people lobby for a single rule imposed on everybody.
Marxism isn't a collection of policy preferences, it's a method of socioeconomic analysis. What makes Hillary and Sanders (neo-)Marxists isn't an accidental agreement with policies advocated in the Communist Manifesto, it is the way Hillary and Sanders apply that method of analysis and justify policies with them.
(In terms of individual policy preferences (e.g., isidewith.com), there is literally no difference for me between Sanders, Clinton, or Trump.)
No, I condemn politics that justifies policies the way Marxists justify politics (class/group conflicts), just like I condemn politics that justifies policies based on God (theocracy), utility to race/nation (national socialism), or utility to "society" (progressivism, technocracy).
I'm a liberal, which means that I believe that policies should be justified based on individual rights, personal autonomy, and personal responsibility.
It's the other way around: you can refuse service except as specifically prohibited by law. Laws restricting the right to refuse service need to be justified based on a compelling government interest. There is certainly no compelling interest in forcing Facebook to post pictures that its users might find offensive.
If Facebook started flagging a disproportionate number of Catholic or Asian pictures as "offensive", that might be taken as evidence of illegal discrimination, but even that is not clearcut.
If it's posted on Facebook, it almost always falls into two categories: inane or offensive. So, a very simple algorithm for avoiding photos you don't want to see is... to quit Facebook.