The truly free market for jobs is really one of the intriguing things about UBI. I make good money now, and my job isn't bad, but if I had $1k/month in extra money, I'd really have to consider trying to find a job like more, even if it paid less. Out of college I definitely wouldn't have had the first few jobs I had. I'd have done wild and crazy shit, trying to chase a dream.
I can imagine folks taking $2/hr to do a few hours of gardening a week for a local business, or to babysit, or dog walk. Not because they need the money, but because they love doing it. And if they love it enough to do it for free? It gets done for free. The flip side is also true. Do you love garbage so much you want to be a garbage collector? No? Then those wages will likely go up. Because if you can find a better job where the lower pay is offset by UBI, a lot of people are going to do that.
A truly free market for jobs is going to be incredibly disruptive. UBI needs to be rolled out slowly for that reason. If we just did full UBI in a short period of time, the employment market would explode as jobs suddenly drastically changed in wage. Very hard to budget for something like that!
Part of what UBI can solve is homelessness, flexibility to take care of kids or other dependents, unstable or seasonal jobs, etc. Universal Employment wouldn't necessarily solve a lot of those problems.
I agree with you that UBI is much smaller change, and it allows for a lot more flexibility in the workforce. You're not going to solve homelessness for people with drug and alcohol problems or mental health issues if you force them to work to get paid. They're just not going to want or be able to do it. But if you take a chunk of their UBI and rent a place for them, and deliver the rest to that address, now they might at least get off the streets, and have a shot at some treatment.
I'm most excited about the potential for young, creative, motivated people to take some risks. From an economic standpoint, we need new businesses and new industries. We need inventions and advances in technology and science. If you've got UBI to fall back on, you can take more risks and not end up homeless.
Let the Post Office administer UBI, and let people use the Post Office like a bank. Boom. Now we've significantly limited the parasitic banks, meaning everyone has more money back in their pocket. Need to pay rent with your UBI? Post Office transfers it into the landlord's account. Need to send it to the kid at college? Done. Kid at college needs to pay tuition or fees? Transfer it into the University's account. Now we've solved both the Post Office's financial issues and UBI administration, while making banking free and accessible for everyone.
That was exactly my first thought as well. Hell, it was happening on kik as I understand it already. Now the company can potentially make some money on the deal too.
You offer users the ability to play "games" (i.e. watch interactive ads) and give them fake money, they pass it on for porn, porn returns it for real money or pays for additional services using it. Thus advertisement money goes to kik, and some small amount of that goes to people making porn, the rest goes in their pocket, and the porn using population doesn't need to pay for porn. And heck, some users will want to pay kik for fake money to use in games and for porn anyway, and that's just more in their pocket. It's brilliant!
$50 says facebook is doing this in a year if it's successful. It would be a very good way to further monitize their users.
I doubt you would. Humans are just not efficient, and they mess up otherwise efficient systems. Unless your logic circuits are corrupted and you derive pleasure from fixing inefficient systems, I couldn't see why you'd want one. And besides, a machine could come up with a better way to make a system inefficient so that you'd have more and more challenging work to do.
Of course, we've only seen 2 games, so it's a bit too early to call that yet.
Against the greatest human Go player. Those two games tell us all we need to know.
The human can dedicate their life to Go, and focus on it to exclusion. But at the end of the day, that human needs to eat, sleep, and take time off to rest. That human is one brain, and has one set of inputs, and can chew on one situation at a time.
AlphaGo can add in more processors, memory, and suck in hundreds of thousands of matches to learn from. AlphaGo can be cloned an infinite number of times, and play against itself in parallel, learning from every match.
Two wins against the top human in the world is really all that we need to know about how well it plays Go. Humans just can't learn this particular task as fast as the AI can, and can't likely learn it as deeply either. How long did AlphaGo take to learn to compete at the highest level compared to how long the humans did? A couple of years? Unless you think this is the absolute best the computer can do, another couple of years and its abilities will look nearly magical compared to human players.
Man, I just spent 15 minutes trying to reply to this explaining a great forum ruleset I once experienced, and all I got was "Lameness filter encountered". Apparently paragraphs with some variant of "dick", "admin", and "troll" trigger the filter, and I'm not allowed to post. Ridiculous how sad this place has gotten.
I once came up with a technical way to design a system that reduced the need for mods. There were two major issues with it, when I play-tested it. The first was that how it worked was so opaque that most users would never understand it. The second was that it just formed echo chambers. I guess keeping the facebook crowd and the 4chan crowd confined to their own threads would be ok, but then the game for the trolls becomes exploring the limits of the mod system. Are you safe with 10/1 good/troll posts, or can you bump that up to 8/1? Can you get the mods to tighten the system enough that non-trolls start to get identified?
The problem with such systems is that we have absolutely no idea how they'll behave at various edge cases.
I fail to see how this is a problem, unless these "edge cases" are things that doctors get correct far more often. My suspicion is that they will not be. As a good example, see the recent study that the older the doctor, the higher the patient mortality rate. There was no causation in the study, only correlation, but regardless of the causation, it's pretty darn likely that AI will soon be doing a better job with diagnoses. AI can be updated with modern understanding and recent studies in a way that a brain which has done medicine for 30 years can't be. We can put far more info into AI systems than we can put into a brain, and actually get meaningful decisions out of it. Theoretically, we'll have less bias with AI, as it won't come with cultural/ageist/sexist/racist notions, and will rely upon data.
And as others have pointed out, we can diagnose what went wrong, and then feed it back into the AI systems to learn from. One edge case can instantly be diagnosed and sent to all the AI systems to incorporate in their algorithms. That's going to reduce them even faster, as it will only take a few examples before that particular edge case doesn't happen any more.
As to who's responsible, it's who owns and operates the AI. They chose that over a human doctor. Most likely, they chose that because it's cheaper and/or better than a human doctor. If that's the case, they should be OK with taking responsibility for the misdiagnosis, because AI is a net benefit over employing a doctor. If it's not, then they're idiots, and should get sued for a misdiagnosis. Regardless, the owner/operator of the AI will still likely need malpractice insurance.
If that's the case, they're never going to tell anyone. They'd be out of business in a hurry if they did. If anything, they're going to bury this and/or mould it into good news as much as possible. I can't imagine how terrifying it would be to find out that your entire business model doesn't work well.
My guess would be that online advertising works a bit, but not anywhere near as well as anyone thinks it does. But it works just well enough for some companies that it seems worth doing to most other companies.
I'm curious how many programming jobs are code monkey jobs, and how many are fairly unique cases. My last coding job was in fluid dynamics research and now I'm crunching more complicated, fucked up, and messy data sets. Neither are code-monkey work or with a team. I'm wondering how many jobs like these are out there - just a few people bashing out code for a specific niche need.
As compared to my first programming job, I really love(d) these two. Independent, quiet, and cranking out good work. Lots of complex problems to solve, and no piles of endless meetings, poorly thought-out requirements, threats of outsourcing, etc. I can choose my own toolsets, and what matters is that, at the end of the day, I've made sense out of difficult data.
I no longer code for a living, haven't done that for a very long time. But I write code just about every day. Now my tasks are to analyze large data sets and to help formulate policy decisions and improve businesses processes.
A lot of my colleagues do this work without coding. They do all sorts of insane and stupid shit with Excel and Access, and spend a lot of time doing tedious shit by hand. I spend a lot of time automating that shit, in the hopes that the next time I have to do it, it's close enough that I save myself a boatload of time. Sometimes works out, sometimes doesn't.
But that's fun for me. Data handling is awesome, and I love coding to pull in shitty data, massage it, and output nice clean data sets. I love writing code to do rough analysis on those data sets to see if there might be some really important information in there.
I've got the luxury of doing essentially personal coding for a living. That's amazing. Very glad to no longer have to code with others. Sometimes that's fun, but a lot of time it turns into a real grind.
As for ethically complex, the decisions that come out of my analyses do indeed impact human beings, in a number of different ways and settings. However, I'm much happier trusting clear, well-commented code for that than a bunch of Excel macros, linked sheets, and pivot tables. I shudder to think what's buried in my co-workers' analyses.
If you sin and RTFA, you'll see that that amount is for the "perfect getaway", and includes $500 for tickets to the amusement park, $350 in food, and $1500 in travel costs.
Around here, we have a $1B shortfall in our road fund, and they need many times that much maintenance. However our R-run state refuses to raise the gas tax. The very tax that is there to pay for the roads. Half the population cheers this, while simultaneously complaining about how terrible the roads are, with a measurable uptick in repairs for tires and suspensions. Because $2k in suspension work is a personal expense, while $0.10 higher gas prices are government overreach and an affront to society.
But it looks like we'll just borrow the cash anyway, because in another 4-8 years the Dems will sweep in to raise taxes to fix the problem, and then immediately get voted out for raising taxes.
You're off by an order of magnitude, at least. 70k people worked for the social security administration in 2010. It's definitely not millions. And I'd argue that if the best jobs are administering welfare programs, those aren't great job options. Better an investment in those communities so that new business can spring up. I think UBI would do that, because there wouldn't be as much risk in trying to start a business, and there is an incentive to work even part-time, because you'll have more money in your pocket. The problem with our current welfare programs is that for many of them, you hit a dollar limit and you lose 100% of your benefits. No incentive to work too much with that scheme.
I suspect that nobody is going to work a register at McDonald's for $2 an hour...
I absolutely agree, although it has nothing to do with UBI. Cashier jobs are going away pretty darn rapidly. Those are prime jobs for automation. Most jobs that require little skill and which are incredibly repetitive are going away. It's cheaper to have a machine do them, even if it requires re-architecturing your business to do it.
This is why we're talking about UBI in the first place. How do we ensure, in a time of plenty and in a time where we have food security, that everyone is fed and housed?
The jobs that will get $6/hour knocked off them are the ones where someone's passion would make up for that money. Artisan baker, bartender, chef, tailor, gardener, mechanic. Jobs that someone would be doing anyway, even if they didn't get paid to do it. The flip side to this is that are likely jobs that will get far more expensive if people don't need to do them to put food on the table. Garbage collector, plumber, sewage treatment worker, etc., if those can't be automated.
If you knock $6/hr off my salary but UBI is worth about $8/hr, I'm not going to be sad at all. An extra $2/hr is a nice little bonus, even if $1 goes towards taxes. And if my business just saved $6/hr on me and everyone else , for every 4-6 of us they can hire another person. Or they can knock less off our salary and give us more. Or they can reinvest in the business. What we need to do to make this work, however, is to ensure that that money actually goes back into the economy, and doesn't just get pooled in the bosses' bank accounts and investment funds.
It's a good point you bring up, but as a counter, it will cost employers minimal to train employees who want training. Why? Because they don't need to pay them much in the way of salary while they train them if those employees have UBI. One of the sticking points in business is that if you train someone, they're drawing a salary, pulling in training resources, and not producing much for your company, and they could just walk out for more pay once trained.
If there is UBI, that person is likely there because they want to be. They don't have to work. You, as a company, have already offered them a compelling reason to show up at work. So now you have far less fear that they're going to just leave, and you have reduced overhead if you can negotiate zero or significantly reduced pay in exchange for training.
In my view, a better way to run things is you "qualify" for UBI by either working, volunteering or being sponsored.
You're missing the point of UBI and social safety nets then. In general, societies have found that it's not good to have some percentage of the population starving and dying in the streets. Throughout history we've had more and less effective ways to deal with this, from debtors prisons, orphanages, and soup lines to the more modern welfare states. In times of scarcity, it makes sense to limit social welfare benefits to those "worthy" of getting them, because there's just not enough for everyone. We're talking UBI more often now because we're quickly exiting that time of scarcity.
We have more food than we know what to do with. With what we throw away every week, we could easily feed everyone who is hungry in the US, and a chunk of the rest of the world as well. We have technologically solved hunger, but we haven't created the social/governmental structure to actually do it.
Maybe at some point in time people won't need to work very much throughout their lives, but we are far from it today...
Our productivity is so high at this point that we are running out of jobs for people to actually do. From a majority of people once employed in agriculture, we're down under 2% now. We're automating jobs away at an exponential rate. Giant factories that used to employ thousands are being brought back to the US from China, and are now employing hundreds. Underemployment in the US has been running around 13-14%, and it's not going down at all.
I think we're at this point in time, but we haven't realized it yet because it's buried in race and class issues. Unemployment in my area for African-Americans is something like 35%, but with 3% unemployment for White people, that gets masked when we look at the overall unemployment rate. Likewise, unemployment out in the country is far higher than in the cities, but there have always been poor farmers and rich city folks, that's the status quo. Unfortunately, those farmers out in the country are never getting their jobs back. That work is done by machines now. I honestly don't know what folks in the hundreds of small farm towns in my state are going to be doing in a decade. The old folks can't retire so they work menial farm jobs until they are dead or on welfare, and there are no jobs for the kids so they move away. But in between are hundreds of thousands of middle-aged folks who don't have more than a HS education and don't have any skills or anywhere to work even if they had them. Just tends of thousands of acres with house-sized tractors tending them, and trucks humming past their houses taking the goods away to market.
There's a good chance that companies can pay less salary and give employees an overall higher take-home income with UBI. Provided we can pull back a little of that increased company income in taxes, we're giving the economy a big shot in the arm. If UBI is worth $8/hr and a business can reduce salaries by $6/hr, employees make more, the company makes more, and the profits on the company get taxed more. With the company making more they can hire more people or pay their employees more (again, dependent on sensible taxation) and if the employees are making more, they will likely spend more too.
Add in the small business risk-taking that UBI would enable, and the prospect has me pretty excited. I'm getting more convinced that we need to become more socialist to become more capitalist, because you can't have a sustainable free market society if it means people are dying in the streets. Provide the social safety net and reduce the overhead of running a business, and that's an economic game-changer, I'm guessing.
Your numbers match roughly with the ones I crunched above, working the other direction. I took our $2.6T annual income and payroll taxes and divided them up among the population of the US. That came to about $7k/person annually, which would be $14k for a single parent and kid, and $28k for a family of four. And that is essentially the poverty line currently.
As you noted, with $3.3T of total federal revenues, there isn't much left over once you do UBI. Certainly not enough to to stack UBI with anything else. But this ignores $2.5T in money held by US companies overseas, and the federal revenues assumes that there is no economic change due to UBI.
While there will definitely be waste and fraud with UBI, if structured in a functional manner it would likely be an economic net gain. There are perverse incentives to not work when on assistance now, because there are hard cutoffs when you make too much money. I talked to a guy the other night devastated because his family made $700 too much last year, and they're getting kicked off medicaid. He's looking at hundreds of dollars per month more in health insurance costs, far offsetting the money that triggered the change. With UBI, this doesn't happen. People are free to wrok as much or as little as they want, and they can take business risks without worrying about dying in the streets.
Of course, this ignores the howls that would arise from a populace deprived of their SS checks and foodstamps.
Then you've never met someone who has had to be on food stamps. The EBT rules are ridiculous and stupid, and only certain foods qualify. I doubt anyone would complain about getting a check instead of a debit card that rejects paying for random shit based on some arbitrary rules. The estimated average monthly SS benefit for "all retired workers" in 2016 is $1,341, a statement plucked from Google. It would definitely be a reduction in income if we immediately switched from SS to UBI, but I don't know that anyone is suggesting that we do that. We can phase out SS and phase in UBI.
It looks close to workable in the US, although we'd have to tighten up on corporate taxing, and not have our elected infants totally screw it up intentionally. And given those caveats, it will never happen in the US.
Basically, since welfare isn’t on any kind of sliding scale, it actively discourages working.
That's why some UBI implementations call for a negative income rate for the bottom x% of the population. If you don't work you get your max UBI, but the more you make the less UBI you get. Done correctly, for every $1000 you make you only use $500 in UBI, so there's always an incentive to work on top of UBI.
What I’d like to know is how much the welfare system, with all of its admin overhead, costs that doesn’t go to people’s welfare checks.
My spitballing above put it at about $10T or about $30/person in the US/year for administrative costs currently. Not enough to fund UBI in the least.
Oh, and new Mercedes can be had for $30k now. Used ones for less than that. Just having that badge is no longer a mark of wealth.
I'd love to dive into the financials to see how it would work here in the states.
Above I posted a blurb where I did a quick google and got an estimate that our social welfare programs seemed to be on the order of about $10B/year in administrative costs. That's $30/person in the US. Not anywhere near enough savings to make UBI possible, even if you saved it all. Looks like we collect about $2.6T in income and payroll taxes at the federal level in the US every year. Divided by 360M people that's a bit over $7,000 per person per year.
If you give that to infants and children, that means a family of 4 would be in the $28k/year range, which is right at the poverty line. So if we spend most of our money, we can do it. We'd have about $0.5T left over for running the government and the military.
Needless to say, it would require a significant upheaval in society for us to do this.
But if you don't NEED the job merely to not die, you can CHOOSE your job.
That's what I think holds the most promise for UBI. Far too many wage slaves and office drones because it's keeping them fed and the lights on at home. I bet there would be massive uptick in creative and innovative businesses being experimented with if people could try without risking poverty. More arts, music, gardens, and beauty in the world.
I'm all for UBI and no minimum wage. If UBI is enough to keep everyone fed, housed, and generally healthy, there is no need for an artificially forced minimum wage, nor overtime nor anything else save safety regulations. Let businesses compete for workers however they see fit. Wages, perks, housing, good will, whatever you want, because people can quit at any time.
Smoking pot in your parents' basement and collecting a check from the government to pay for your weed and doritos is not a valid occupation.
Why not?
And I'm somewhat serious. Yes, it offends your puritanical mindset, but what jobs are you creating for the folks who would lean this way? Used to be, half the population or more was involved in agriculture. Now we're under 2%, and we produce more food than ever before. We make so much food that we can't get eat it fast enough. We export food around the world. With a little better distribution and a bit of planning, we could feed everyone in the US handily, based on the food waste we throw out. We have technologically ended hunger, and are only waiting on the social and governmental structures needed to truly end it.
One major problem down. There is really no reason for that couch potato to starve, because we could feed them on our food waste at no real extra cost. Millions of them.
The rise of wind and solar and the massive uptick in natural gas is driving energy costs lower and lower. We used to employ millions and millions in energy-related businesses, but those are increasingly automated. And another major problem being mitigated. When it's trivial and inexpensive to keep the lights and heat on for that basement dweller, why would we not do that?
"Work or die" has been a reality for most all of human history. But there's no compelling reason for it to remain a reality. Give me UBI, and I'm not going to stay home. I want more. I might, however, take 6 months off to finish the novel I've been working on for years. I might see if I can push some of my hobbies and business ideas into real businesses. UBI would give me the safety net to take those risks. Will some people use it to sit in their parents' basement and smoke weed? Sure. And if they do, why should you or I or anyone else care? It's not like we don't have the resources to keep them alive.
As an analogy, we switched to a new travel reimbursement system at work. We routinely waste close to as much money in salary time as we scrape back jumping through the hoops. "Because someone might abuse it", we've got micromanaging rules about how and what we can claim.
Give us a company credit card, and have one person take a skim through the purchases afterwards. If there are questions, ask them. In the long run, that would likely save a pile of money.
"You charged mileage from the airport to your house, but work is 1 mile closer to the airport, and you're required to pick the closer of the two destinations. Please re-file your reimbursement with updated mileage because we won't pay you $0.50 extra, but would rather you waste $2 of your time doing paperwork, and another $10 of our time reviewing it again."
Cost-benefit analyses seem to escape HR, except if they can do it incorrectly and make everything work more poorly.
Back to UBI, that's one very good argument for it. There are so many federal assistance programs with so much bureaucratic overhead that there should be substantial savings in efficiency with UBI. The problem is that these programs only cover subsets of the population, and that their administrative overhead is often only a few percent of their entire budget. There's not universal coverage, and there's not enough savings to allow for it.
Total administrative costs for all of our social welfare programs is on the order of $10 billion, based on a quick google search. ($5+B in the late 90s, last consolidated data I could find.) Even if we could get rid of 100% of that, $30/person isn't going to fund UBI.
I'm a deep STEM person now in a more bureaucratic job, and a lot of the people around me are boggled by the automation that I'm doing. Quick scripts to parse Excel files, co-editing Google Docs to create final drafts in 1/4 the time it used to take, creating Google Sheets that automatically parse data and make pretty graphs, all sorts of utterly trivial things that massively boost productivity. It's just that nobody in this office ever had the skills or knowledge to do this.
Now, we're saying that even high end positions like healthcare workers are in for a big restructuring as more stuff gets automated.
I don't think that even the low-hanging fruit has been automated yet. Even if we could retrain the folks that mundane office automation and machine learning will replace to be healthcare workers, if those jobs are gone, when then?
Will we have a Star Trek utopia where everyone does what they're best at instead of driving to MegaCorp every morning to file papers? Or will we have a Hunger Games style existence or go back to feudal serfdom?
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The truly free market for jobs is really one of the intriguing things about UBI. I make good money now, and my job isn't bad, but if I had $1k/month in extra money, I'd really have to consider trying to find a job like more, even if it paid less. Out of college I definitely wouldn't have had the first few jobs I had. I'd have done wild and crazy shit, trying to chase a dream.
I can imagine folks taking $2/hr to do a few hours of gardening a week for a local business, or to babysit, or dog walk. Not because they need the money, but because they love doing it. And if they love it enough to do it for free? It gets done for free. The flip side is also true. Do you love garbage so much you want to be a garbage collector? No? Then those wages will likely go up. Because if you can find a better job where the lower pay is offset by UBI, a lot of people are going to do that.
A truly free market for jobs is going to be incredibly disruptive. UBI needs to be rolled out slowly for that reason. If we just did full UBI in a short period of time, the employment market would explode as jobs suddenly drastically changed in wage. Very hard to budget for something like that!
Part of what UBI can solve is homelessness, flexibility to take care of kids or other dependents, unstable or seasonal jobs, etc. Universal Employment wouldn't necessarily solve a lot of those problems.
I agree with you that UBI is much smaller change, and it allows for a lot more flexibility in the workforce. You're not going to solve homelessness for people with drug and alcohol problems or mental health issues if you force them to work to get paid. They're just not going to want or be able to do it. But if you take a chunk of their UBI and rent a place for them, and deliver the rest to that address, now they might at least get off the streets, and have a shot at some treatment.
I'm most excited about the potential for young, creative, motivated people to take some risks. From an economic standpoint, we need new businesses and new industries. We need inventions and advances in technology and science. If you've got UBI to fall back on, you can take more risks and not end up homeless.
Let the Post Office administer UBI, and let people use the Post Office like a bank. Boom. Now we've significantly limited the parasitic banks, meaning everyone has more money back in their pocket. Need to pay rent with your UBI? Post Office transfers it into the landlord's account. Need to send it to the kid at college? Done. Kid at college needs to pay tuition or fees? Transfer it into the University's account. Now we've solved both the Post Office's financial issues and UBI administration, while making banking free and accessible for everyone.
That was exactly my first thought as well. Hell, it was happening on kik as I understand it already. Now the company can potentially make some money on the deal too.
You offer users the ability to play "games" (i.e. watch interactive ads) and give them fake money, they pass it on for porn, porn returns it for real money or pays for additional services using it. Thus advertisement money goes to kik, and some small amount of that goes to people making porn, the rest goes in their pocket, and the porn using population doesn't need to pay for porn. And heck, some users will want to pay kik for fake money to use in games and for porn anyway, and that's just more in their pocket. It's brilliant!
$50 says facebook is doing this in a year if it's successful. It would be a very good way to further monitize their users.
I doubt you would. Humans are just not efficient, and they mess up otherwise efficient systems. Unless your logic circuits are corrupted and you derive pleasure from fixing inefficient systems, I couldn't see why you'd want one. And besides, a machine could come up with a better way to make a system inefficient so that you'd have more and more challenging work to do.
Of course, we've only seen 2 games, so it's a bit too early to call that yet.
Against the greatest human Go player. Those two games tell us all we need to know.
The human can dedicate their life to Go, and focus on it to exclusion. But at the end of the day, that human needs to eat, sleep, and take time off to rest. That human is one brain, and has one set of inputs, and can chew on one situation at a time.
AlphaGo can add in more processors, memory, and suck in hundreds of thousands of matches to learn from. AlphaGo can be cloned an infinite number of times, and play against itself in parallel, learning from every match.
Two wins against the top human in the world is really all that we need to know about how well it plays Go. Humans just can't learn this particular task as fast as the AI can, and can't likely learn it as deeply either. How long did AlphaGo take to learn to compete at the highest level compared to how long the humans did? A couple of years? Unless you think this is the absolute best the computer can do, another couple of years and its abilities will look nearly magical compared to human players.
Man, I just spent 15 minutes trying to reply to this explaining a great forum ruleset I once experienced, and all I got was "Lameness filter encountered". Apparently paragraphs with some variant of "dick", "admin", and "troll" trigger the filter, and I'm not allowed to post. Ridiculous how sad this place has gotten.
I once came up with a technical way to design a system that reduced the need for mods. There were two major issues with it, when I play-tested it. The first was that how it worked was so opaque that most users would never understand it. The second was that it just formed echo chambers. I guess keeping the facebook crowd and the 4chan crowd confined to their own threads would be ok, but then the game for the trolls becomes exploring the limits of the mod system. Are you safe with 10/1 good/troll posts, or can you bump that up to 8/1? Can you get the mods to tighten the system enough that non-trolls start to get identified?
The problem with such systems is that we have absolutely no idea how they'll behave at various edge cases.
I fail to see how this is a problem, unless these "edge cases" are things that doctors get correct far more often. My suspicion is that they will not be. As a good example, see the recent study that the older the doctor, the higher the patient mortality rate. There was no causation in the study, only correlation, but regardless of the causation, it's pretty darn likely that AI will soon be doing a better job with diagnoses. AI can be updated with modern understanding and recent studies in a way that a brain which has done medicine for 30 years can't be. We can put far more info into AI systems than we can put into a brain, and actually get meaningful decisions out of it. Theoretically, we'll have less bias with AI, as it won't come with cultural/ageist/sexist/racist notions, and will rely upon data.
And as others have pointed out, we can diagnose what went wrong, and then feed it back into the AI systems to learn from. One edge case can instantly be diagnosed and sent to all the AI systems to incorporate in their algorithms. That's going to reduce them even faster, as it will only take a few examples before that particular edge case doesn't happen any more.
As to who's responsible, it's who owns and operates the AI. They chose that over a human doctor. Most likely, they chose that because it's cheaper and/or better than a human doctor. If that's the case, they should be OK with taking responsibility for the misdiagnosis, because AI is a net benefit over employing a doctor. If it's not, then they're idiots, and should get sued for a misdiagnosis. Regardless, the owner/operator of the AI will still likely need malpractice insurance.
If that's the case, they're never going to tell anyone. They'd be out of business in a hurry if they did. If anything, they're going to bury this and/or mould it into good news as much as possible. I can't imagine how terrifying it would be to find out that your entire business model doesn't work well.
My guess would be that online advertising works a bit, but not anywhere near as well as anyone thinks it does. But it works just well enough for some companies that it seems worth doing to most other companies.
I'm curious how many programming jobs are code monkey jobs, and how many are fairly unique cases. My last coding job was in fluid dynamics research and now I'm crunching more complicated, fucked up, and messy data sets. Neither are code-monkey work or with a team. I'm wondering how many jobs like these are out there - just a few people bashing out code for a specific niche need.
As compared to my first programming job, I really love(d) these two. Independent, quiet, and cranking out good work. Lots of complex problems to solve, and no piles of endless meetings, poorly thought-out requirements, threats of outsourcing, etc. I can choose my own toolsets, and what matters is that, at the end of the day, I've made sense out of difficult data.
I no longer code for a living, haven't done that for a very long time. But I write code just about every day. Now my tasks are to analyze large data sets and to help formulate policy decisions and improve businesses processes.
A lot of my colleagues do this work without coding. They do all sorts of insane and stupid shit with Excel and Access, and spend a lot of time doing tedious shit by hand. I spend a lot of time automating that shit, in the hopes that the next time I have to do it, it's close enough that I save myself a boatload of time. Sometimes works out, sometimes doesn't.
But that's fun for me. Data handling is awesome, and I love coding to pull in shitty data, massage it, and output nice clean data sets. I love writing code to do rough analysis on those data sets to see if there might be some really important information in there.
I've got the luxury of doing essentially personal coding for a living. That's amazing. Very glad to no longer have to code with others. Sometimes that's fun, but a lot of time it turns into a real grind.
As for ethically complex, the decisions that come out of my analyses do indeed impact human beings, in a number of different ways and settings. However, I'm much happier trusting clear, well-commented code for that than a bunch of Excel macros, linked sheets, and pivot tables. I shudder to think what's buried in my co-workers' analyses.
I clicked for your sins, and that's the cost of a 'perfect weekend' which apparently involves flying to Disney World. Clickbait summary.
If you sin and RTFA, you'll see that that amount is for the "perfect getaway", and includes $500 for tickets to the amusement park, $350 in food, and $1500 in travel costs.
So, clickbait as normal.
Around here, we have a $1B shortfall in our road fund, and they need many times that much maintenance. However our R-run state refuses to raise the gas tax. The very tax that is there to pay for the roads. Half the population cheers this, while simultaneously complaining about how terrible the roads are, with a measurable uptick in repairs for tires and suspensions. Because $2k in suspension work is a personal expense, while $0.10 higher gas prices are government overreach and an affront to society.
But it looks like we'll just borrow the cash anyway, because in another 4-8 years the Dems will sweep in to raise taxes to fix the problem, and then immediately get voted out for raising taxes.
You're off by an order of magnitude, at least. 70k people worked for the social security administration in 2010. It's definitely not millions. And I'd argue that if the best jobs are administering welfare programs, those aren't great job options. Better an investment in those communities so that new business can spring up. I think UBI would do that, because there wouldn't be as much risk in trying to start a business, and there is an incentive to work even part-time, because you'll have more money in your pocket. The problem with our current welfare programs is that for many of them, you hit a dollar limit and you lose 100% of your benefits. No incentive to work too much with that scheme.
I suspect that nobody is going to work a register at McDonald's for $2 an hour...
I absolutely agree, although it has nothing to do with UBI. Cashier jobs are going away pretty darn rapidly. Those are prime jobs for automation. Most jobs that require little skill and which are incredibly repetitive are going away. It's cheaper to have a machine do them, even if it requires re-architecturing your business to do it.
This is why we're talking about UBI in the first place. How do we ensure, in a time of plenty and in a time where we have food security, that everyone is fed and housed?
The jobs that will get $6/hour knocked off them are the ones where someone's passion would make up for that money. Artisan baker, bartender, chef, tailor, gardener, mechanic. Jobs that someone would be doing anyway, even if they didn't get paid to do it. The flip side to this is that are likely jobs that will get far more expensive if people don't need to do them to put food on the table. Garbage collector, plumber, sewage treatment worker, etc., if those can't be automated.
If you knock $6/hr off my salary but UBI is worth about $8/hr, I'm not going to be sad at all. An extra $2/hr is a nice little bonus, even if $1 goes towards taxes. And if my business just saved $6/hr on me and everyone else , for every 4-6 of us they can hire another person. Or they can knock less off our salary and give us more. Or they can reinvest in the business. What we need to do to make this work, however, is to ensure that that money actually goes back into the economy, and doesn't just get pooled in the bosses' bank accounts and investment funds.
It's a good point you bring up, but as a counter, it will cost employers minimal to train employees who want training. Why? Because they don't need to pay them much in the way of salary while they train them if those employees have UBI. One of the sticking points in business is that if you train someone, they're drawing a salary, pulling in training resources, and not producing much for your company, and they could just walk out for more pay once trained.
If there is UBI, that person is likely there because they want to be. They don't have to work. You, as a company, have already offered them a compelling reason to show up at work. So now you have far less fear that they're going to just leave, and you have reduced overhead if you can negotiate zero or significantly reduced pay in exchange for training.
In my view, a better way to run things is you "qualify" for UBI by either working, volunteering or being sponsored.
You're missing the point of UBI and social safety nets then. In general, societies have found that it's not good to have some percentage of the population starving and dying in the streets. Throughout history we've had more and less effective ways to deal with this, from debtors prisons, orphanages, and soup lines to the more modern welfare states. In times of scarcity, it makes sense to limit social welfare benefits to those "worthy" of getting them, because there's just not enough for everyone. We're talking UBI more often now because we're quickly exiting that time of scarcity.
We have more food than we know what to do with. With what we throw away every week, we could easily feed everyone who is hungry in the US, and a chunk of the rest of the world as well. We have technologically solved hunger, but we haven't created the social/governmental structure to actually do it.
Maybe at some point in time people won't need to work very much throughout their lives, but we are far from it today...
Our productivity is so high at this point that we are running out of jobs for people to actually do. From a majority of people once employed in agriculture, we're down under 2% now. We're automating jobs away at an exponential rate. Giant factories that used to employ thousands are being brought back to the US from China, and are now employing hundreds. Underemployment in the US has been running around 13-14%, and it's not going down at all.
I think we're at this point in time, but we haven't realized it yet because it's buried in race and class issues. Unemployment in my area for African-Americans is something like 35%, but with 3% unemployment for White people, that gets masked when we look at the overall unemployment rate. Likewise, unemployment out in the country is far higher than in the cities, but there have always been poor farmers and rich city folks, that's the status quo. Unfortunately, those farmers out in the country are never getting their jobs back. That work is done by machines now. I honestly don't know what folks in the hundreds of small farm towns in my state are going to be doing in a decade. The old folks can't retire so they work menial farm jobs until they are dead or on welfare, and there are no jobs for the kids so they move away. But in between are hundreds of thousands of middle-aged folks who don't have more than a HS education and don't have any skills or anywhere to work even if they had them. Just tends of thousands of acres with house-sized tractors tending them, and trucks humming past their houses taking the goods away to market.
There's a good chance that companies can pay less salary and give employees an overall higher take-home income with UBI. Provided we can pull back a little of that increased company income in taxes, we're giving the economy a big shot in the arm. If UBI is worth $8/hr and a business can reduce salaries by $6/hr, employees make more, the company makes more, and the profits on the company get taxed more. With the company making more they can hire more people or pay their employees more (again, dependent on sensible taxation) and if the employees are making more, they will likely spend more too.
Add in the small business risk-taking that UBI would enable, and the prospect has me pretty excited. I'm getting more convinced that we need to become more socialist to become more capitalist, because you can't have a sustainable free market society if it means people are dying in the streets. Provide the social safety net and reduce the overhead of running a business, and that's an economic game-changer, I'm guessing.
Your numbers match roughly with the ones I crunched above, working the other direction. I took our $2.6T annual income and payroll taxes and divided them up among the population of the US. That came to about $7k/person annually, which would be $14k for a single parent and kid, and $28k for a family of four. And that is essentially the poverty line currently.
As you noted, with $3.3T of total federal revenues, there isn't much left over once you do UBI. Certainly not enough to to stack UBI with anything else. But this ignores $2.5T in money held by US companies overseas, and the federal revenues assumes that there is no economic change due to UBI.
While there will definitely be waste and fraud with UBI, if structured in a functional manner it would likely be an economic net gain. There are perverse incentives to not work when on assistance now, because there are hard cutoffs when you make too much money. I talked to a guy the other night devastated because his family made $700 too much last year, and they're getting kicked off medicaid. He's looking at hundreds of dollars per month more in health insurance costs, far offsetting the money that triggered the change. With UBI, this doesn't happen. People are free to wrok as much or as little as they want, and they can take business risks without worrying about dying in the streets.
Of course, this ignores the howls that would arise from a populace deprived of their SS checks and foodstamps.
Then you've never met someone who has had to be on food stamps. The EBT rules are ridiculous and stupid, and only certain foods qualify. I doubt anyone would complain about getting a check instead of a debit card that rejects paying for random shit based on some arbitrary rules. The estimated average monthly SS benefit for "all retired workers" in 2016 is $1,341, a statement plucked from Google. It would definitely be a reduction in income if we immediately switched from SS to UBI, but I don't know that anyone is suggesting that we do that. We can phase out SS and phase in UBI.
It looks close to workable in the US, although we'd have to tighten up on corporate taxing, and not have our elected infants totally screw it up intentionally. And given those caveats, it will never happen in the US.
Basically, since welfare isn’t on any kind of sliding scale, it actively discourages working.
That's why some UBI implementations call for a negative income rate for the bottom x% of the population. If you don't work you get your max UBI, but the more you make the less UBI you get. Done correctly, for every $1000 you make you only use $500 in UBI, so there's always an incentive to work on top of UBI.
What I’d like to know is how much the welfare system, with all of its admin overhead, costs that doesn’t go to people’s welfare checks.
My spitballing above put it at about $10T or about $30/person in the US/year for administrative costs currently. Not enough to fund UBI in the least.
Oh, and new Mercedes can be had for $30k now. Used ones for less than that. Just having that badge is no longer a mark of wealth.
I'd love to dive into the financials to see how it would work here in the states.
Above I posted a blurb where I did a quick google and got an estimate that our social welfare programs seemed to be on the order of about $10B/year in administrative costs. That's $30/person in the US. Not anywhere near enough savings to make UBI possible, even if you saved it all. Looks like we collect about $2.6T in income and payroll taxes at the federal level in the US every year. Divided by 360M people that's a bit over $7,000 per person per year.
If you give that to infants and children, that means a family of 4 would be in the $28k/year range, which is right at the poverty line. So if we spend most of our money, we can do it. We'd have about $0.5T left over for running the government and the military.
Needless to say, it would require a significant upheaval in society for us to do this.
But if you don't NEED the job merely to not die, you can CHOOSE your job.
That's what I think holds the most promise for UBI. Far too many wage slaves and office drones because it's keeping them fed and the lights on at home. I bet there would be massive uptick in creative and innovative businesses being experimented with if people could try without risking poverty. More arts, music, gardens, and beauty in the world.
I'm all for UBI and no minimum wage. If UBI is enough to keep everyone fed, housed, and generally healthy, there is no need for an artificially forced minimum wage, nor overtime nor anything else save safety regulations. Let businesses compete for workers however they see fit. Wages, perks, housing, good will, whatever you want, because people can quit at any time.
Smoking pot in your parents' basement and collecting a check from the government to pay for your weed and doritos is not a valid occupation.
Why not?
And I'm somewhat serious. Yes, it offends your puritanical mindset, but what jobs are you creating for the folks who would lean this way? Used to be, half the population or more was involved in agriculture. Now we're under 2%, and we produce more food than ever before. We make so much food that we can't get eat it fast enough. We export food around the world. With a little better distribution and a bit of planning, we could feed everyone in the US handily, based on the food waste we throw out. We have technologically ended hunger, and are only waiting on the social and governmental structures needed to truly end it.
One major problem down. There is really no reason for that couch potato to starve, because we could feed them on our food waste at no real extra cost. Millions of them.
The rise of wind and solar and the massive uptick in natural gas is driving energy costs lower and lower. We used to employ millions and millions in energy-related businesses, but those are increasingly automated. And another major problem being mitigated. When it's trivial and inexpensive to keep the lights and heat on for that basement dweller, why would we not do that?
"Work or die" has been a reality for most all of human history. But there's no compelling reason for it to remain a reality. Give me UBI, and I'm not going to stay home. I want more. I might, however, take 6 months off to finish the novel I've been working on for years. I might see if I can push some of my hobbies and business ideas into real businesses. UBI would give me the safety net to take those risks. Will some people use it to sit in their parents' basement and smoke weed? Sure. And if they do, why should you or I or anyone else care? It's not like we don't have the resources to keep them alive.
As an analogy, we switched to a new travel reimbursement system at work. We routinely waste close to as much money in salary time as we scrape back jumping through the hoops. "Because someone might abuse it", we've got micromanaging rules about how and what we can claim.
Give us a company credit card, and have one person take a skim through the purchases afterwards. If there are questions, ask them. In the long run, that would likely save a pile of money.
"You charged mileage from the airport to your house, but work is 1 mile closer to the airport, and you're required to pick the closer of the two destinations. Please re-file your reimbursement with updated mileage because we won't pay you $0.50 extra, but would rather you waste $2 of your time doing paperwork, and another $10 of our time reviewing it again."
Cost-benefit analyses seem to escape HR, except if they can do it incorrectly and make everything work more poorly.
Back to UBI, that's one very good argument for it. There are so many federal assistance programs with so much bureaucratic overhead that there should be substantial savings in efficiency with UBI. The problem is that these programs only cover subsets of the population, and that their administrative overhead is often only a few percent of their entire budget. There's not universal coverage, and there's not enough savings to allow for it.
Total administrative costs for all of our social welfare programs is on the order of $10 billion, based on a quick google search. ($5+B in the late 90s, last consolidated data I could find.) Even if we could get rid of 100% of that, $30/person isn't going to fund UBI.
I'm a deep STEM person now in a more bureaucratic job, and a lot of the people around me are boggled by the automation that I'm doing. Quick scripts to parse Excel files, co-editing Google Docs to create final drafts in 1/4 the time it used to take, creating Google Sheets that automatically parse data and make pretty graphs, all sorts of utterly trivial things that massively boost productivity. It's just that nobody in this office ever had the skills or knowledge to do this.
Now, we're saying that even high end positions like healthcare workers are in for a big restructuring as more stuff gets automated.
I don't think that even the low-hanging fruit has been automated yet. Even if we could retrain the folks that mundane office automation and machine learning will replace to be healthcare workers, if those jobs are gone, when then?
Will we have a Star Trek utopia where everyone does what they're best at instead of driving to MegaCorp every morning to file papers? Or will we have a Hunger Games style existence or go back to feudal serfdom?
I'm thinking more Shadowrun without the magic.