We'll borrow the work from future to keep people busy. There will always be plenty of work. IlIn addition to organic vs other food, there will be stall of human grown vs machine grown food etc etc..
When first tractor arrived in my village, when grandfather joked that all the landless labourers will dies of hunger now since there won't be work for them. Manual ploughing reduced but a number of other work became routine. These days it's hard to find labour in my village (western UP).
"American manufacturers use far fewer robots than their competitors, in particular in Taiwan, South Korea and China" [1]. And specialized manufacturing is in a permanent skills shortage. More automation may boost employment and wages for blue-collar workers. Particularly if such kit enables new entrants to challenge incumbents.
There’s no real dignity in work that can easily be done by a robot. A lot of these jobs make people miserable anyway, maybe we shouldn’t be fighting so hard to keep them.
"There’s no real dignity in working to make a living." FTFY
/s But seriously, while I think humans will always find some meaning in work, there will come a day when that work is no longer required. Or at the very least, work will look so different that it will be unrecognizable to us currently. I think "work" will look more and more like "art" in the year 4000 for example.
The idea of a person sacrificing some of their time to enrich the person at the top of a company already sounds bad, but we all accept it must happen so we can afford to live. But when robots and AI takes over labor in a significant way, what will be left for those humans that remain? And let's say we converge on something like a universal basic income to fix this, where will humans find meaning?
I was a huge supporter of UBI for a while, but now I think money is going to become kind of meaningless at some point (the more we print the less it's worth, and UBI policies would struggle to keep up with the inflation they drive)
I'm leaning more towards socialized housing, food, health care, and public transporation now, at least for the basics.
Everyone should be able to at least meet their minimal basic needs without depending on their economic relevance (which isn't a given for many people over the next 100 years). People who want more than the essentials (a house with larger bedrooms, equipment for their hobbies, travel accommodations) can find paid work in positions that still require a human touch.
And if there aren't enough jobs available for everyone who wants one, then start reducing the standard work week from 40 hours, until everyone who wants can find work.
> I'm leaning more towards socialized housing, food, health care, and public transporation now, at least for the basics.
What's the difference between that and UBI? The state giving the people a magical ticket to redeem for food and shelter or simply giving them food and shelter is the same thing at the end of the day.
Both are equally prone to be inflationary as they require workers to provide the food and shelter without receiving anything real in return. In both cases you need to seize real value from the wealthy population if you want to avoid the inflationary effects.
In practice I think giving a stipend to buy shelter is less useful than providing shelter directly in our current political system where large amounts of local regulatory control have been captured by existing landowners — so more money in doesn't mean more production of housing. For example, it's illegal to build significant new housing in most of San Francisco, and NYC zoning and planning restrictions mean that the city has built less housing in the past decade than it built during the Great Depression, despite vastly more money being spent.
There's also the tough tradeoff that money is useful for more than just food and shelter, and so there's high incentive for unscrupulous people to try to get you to transfer it to them instead of covering your basic needs: for example, by spending millions on advertising campaigns to get you to stretch yourself to buy things you don't need; or just regular, transparently illegal things like extortion, selling addictive drugs, etc. It's not that people are dumb, it's that other people have incentive to try to get you to do things that are bad for you but good for them, if you have money. If you have shelter that can't be transferred, there's just a lot less incentive to try to abuse you.
Not that money is bad, just if we're trying to run an efficient program that covers basic needs (but not much else), directly providing the things we want to provide is IMO likely to be more efficient than cash transfers and unaccountably hoping that the cash is spent on what the package is aiming to provide.
In theory, the government is only bearing the cost for people who want to depend on socialized meals, which is different from giving everyone $500/month. With UBI, people are also putting that money back in the private sectors. With socialized meal programs, the government lean on the wealthy to ensure everyone has access to food, and uses that to employ people in the public sector.
> Both are equally prone to be inflationary as they require workers to provide the food and shelter without receiving anything real in return.
I'm not sure I follow why this would be inflationary, but it's also not what I was suggesting.
Even if this does lead to more inflation though, it ensures the government is responsible for securing food and housing for everyone, rather than something like UBI which might result in people who can't find work not actually being able to afford the essentials.
I have the real unpopular opinion that some psychological pressure is necessary for human societies to operate somewhat optimally.
Straight up giving people money is different from living "on stamps". I know it's fashionable these days to call this "shaming" and I guess it is. My question is, is that a bad thing?
If I wasn't shamed/bullied/pestered into being a proper citizen I don't think I'd become one. Maybe I'm just an inferior breed or something, but my guess is this is true for a lot of folks.
Children need to be socialized, and it's fairly unpleasant for them. This would still be needed regardless of how we distribute money. You're not being "a proper citizen" to receive your paycheck, you're being one because you've been brainwashed from an early age to think that you should be.
>I'm leaning more towards socialized housing, food, health care, and public transporation now, at least for the basics.
The problem with this is that these are all limited resources. That's the whole reason we invented money: to control access to limited resources. If you have free housing for everyone, who decides who gets a luxury penthouse apartment, and who lives on a 20 m^2 apartment on the 1st floor? Not everyone can live in the penthouse, and there's not enough room for everyone to have a 300 m^2 apartment without making the city sprawling. Same with food: some food costs a lot more to make than others. Same with healthcare: while arguably everyone should get basic care and emergency care, should we give free plastic surgery to everyone who wants it? Money lets people decide what's more important to them.
I suspect you didn't read the rest of what I wrote.
Subsistence housing and food is by definition not luxury. No one who receives social housing is getting the penthouse suite. Luxury is still pay to play. The government would just provide modest housing and food. Maybe the food is Soylent. Maybe the housing is a studio apartment or a tiny home.
I agree that these are limited resources, but in theory there should be enough housing and food for everyone to survive, and if there isn't, making it a social responsibility can hopefully catalyze action to change that. The government has a lot more sway in getting more housing built (and in fact, are often responsible for policies that prevent enough housing being built) than someone who can't afford market rent for an unglamorous studio.
I think both ideas have their merits. I think we can all agree that progress isn’t necessarily linear. So maybe in 2100 we won’t quite get to what I’m talking about, but by 4000 I don’t think anyone can claim that we’ll be working 40 hours a week and paying bills with credit cards still.
>But when robots and AI takes over labor in a significant way, what will be left for those humans that remain?
If AI gets advanced enough that it can make art better than humans (not just technically superior, but artistically superior, more inspired/innovative etc.), then humans will be truly obsolete and doomed, because AIs will be just as sentient as humans, but more capable.
If AIs don't quite reach this point, but still do all the other drudge-work, humans are going to have a hard time still. Some humans will do great, because they'll be doing things that AIs can't, and working by telling AIs what to do, but not-so-smart humans will find themselves without any purpose in life, and only UBI to keep them from rioting.
The only way AIs won’t reach the point of being better than humans is if we intentionally stop, I fear. Once an AI is trained, you can copy it a million times over. A human takes many years to learn a skill to the point of mastery.
> A lot of these jobs make people miserable anyway
A lot of these jobs also make people happy, though. That is why the loss of manufacturing in particular was such a blow to Americans. People love manufacturing – to the point that having small-scale manufacturing facilities in one's garage so that one can keep on manufacturing things on the weekend is a dream of many.
This is a foundation of the liberal tradition and one on which e.g. Smith and Marx would agree: human-scale industry is among our most fundamental (and prolific) predilections
Moreover that it tends to produce better outcomes than the frantic, often brutal thrust of the greater industrial revolution
This is not to condemn labor-saving ingenuity but to advise deep consideration with regard to social and material technologies
Humans only own and consume while robots (functionally, the capital of this economy) provide the labour. Everyone is a founder, but instead of co-founders and employees, you just command a team of AIs and robots. You're still trying to innovate and provide a product, as are others to you. But nobody is selling labour per se.
> Surely you mean the top 1%, who have the capital to invest into robots?
Whomever we empower. The people left out of the loop would die, suffer in quiet subsistence or be folded into the society. The first two are the "people are pests" solution. You see it in resource-rich countries where the population isn't part of the economic machinery.
The last is precedented; see how ancient Sparta dealt its public allotments of land and slaves. Which way various societies go will depend, in part, on decisions we take today. (Should such a future come to pass, which, again, is predicated on massive leaps in robotics and AI.)
Leaving aside the convenient assumption that AI will take every job except CEO…this sounds insanely competitive and most people don’t have it in them to do this.
> the convenient assumption that AI will take every job except CEO
One, I don't assume this will happen. I was responding to the hypothetical of an AGI and economic model without workers. Two, I outright assume AI will take the job of CEO. Otherwise, we're still selling labour. What we can provide AI, novelly, is our preferences. In that hypothetical world, most people would presumably let their AI(s) manage their capital. The same way many aristocrats couldn't tell you anything about how their estates generated income.
And also the value judgement shifts more and more from physicality to how much you upset communities, similar to how BS modern art works. We'd be paying not cash for a banana but will be paying in contexts for contexts.
> AGI will claim the novelty of ‘innovation’ from humans too
One, sure, we can expand the hypothetical envelope to infinity. That wasn't the question.
Two, I'm not sure. Human preferences need not be rational. Given the choice, many would choose the flawed work of a human versus the synthesized product of an AGI.
Three, if we have an AGI that can do everything humans can do we've rendered the question irrelevant. There is no "economy" anymore because everything can be centrally measured, produced and dispatched. By the AGI. (Or it can destroy us.) Either way, we return to production and consumption of non-AI work products being purely voluntary.
Humans squeezed out of the existing economy will engage in a parallel economy. It will be interesting how these things will interplay and what it will lead to in the end.
Does it? If I pay you to move rocks back and forth in a field does that work have dignity?
Making someone work a job that could be done cheaper and faster by a robot doesn’t benefit anyone. You’re destroying economic value and wasting the worker’s time.
Well over 50% of workers report being satisfied with their job. Automation eliminating jobs people are satisfied or happy with is almost certainly a loss the workers, even if it is an improvement overall.
I say this as someone who knows he has been directly responsible for eliminating dozens of jobs through automation. Not all the people affected had lives were improved by the job elimination, even if I truly believe our solution made far more peoples lives better and was a win overall.
This seems like a perception thing. Like the person moving rocks might be extremely grateful just to have a job. The mentally disabled, ex-cons, and other people who have been overlooked for work for many years all likely experience a sense of dignity in being paid to work. Perhaps they even delude themselves into thinking moving rocks is somehow useful or necessary.
I always found it weird that outsiders need to dictate what dignity is, since it is an internal state/feeling about own actions.
I’m not against automating high toil (the definition from the Google SRE book) jobs. But people will find dignity in their hobbies if they can’t find it at work. If they can’t find dignity there, they have been failed by society.
Yes, in the same way as a work-out in the gym has dignity and value. In the gym you're just moving some metal chunks up and down, but that work has tremendous physical and mental effects on the person doing it.
It has dignity if it gives purpose. I can tell you right now there’s a substantial portion of a generation of people who see working _for_ anyone as purposeless.
There’s already value in the human made and hand crafted. Maybe our society just becomes one where we’re left to the retirement of a civilization.
Might just take a while for it to be economical for lots of jobs. The amount of humans is increasing, the amount of natural resources, different story.
People underestimated how much brainpower is involved in simple mechanical tasks, and they probably overestimated how much is required for things like object recognition. Even simple tasks like lifting weights involve motor learning.
