GasBandit
Staff member
And so would talking animals and chocolate air.
Get rid of welfare and just give every adult $870/mo
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GasBandit
Staff member
Not without free limitless energy in at least fusion-level amounts plus matter replication technology. It's all about as equally farfetched.
We have the capability for at least half of that right now.
The trouble is, no current generation has ever wanted to sacrifice their existence to make sure that all the following generations will have it easy because that's "not fair."
People just aren't willing to sacrifice themselves as individuals for the success of the entire species.
--Patrick
Energy production isn't even the issue anymore (in the US anyway)... it's energy transfer and storage. We can make cars and trucks that work with electrical energy just fine, but you still need to carry around a bazillion batteries that need to be replaced every ten years, and you still need to plug the thing in for hours at your home. Same with homes: you really can't effectively run a house on solar energy without a pretty hefty space commitment for batteries and that only works when you don't need to blow AC/Heat 24 hours a day.
We're not there quite yet, but we're almost.
Couple months ago, Gas is behind.
If you think that domestic energy consumption even holds a CANDLE up against commercial and industrial usage, you are fooling yourself, and those around you. The real consumers are industry, quickly followed by any building bigger than a house. There are SINGLE MACHINES in the mining industry that consume the equivalent of more than 10,000 houses worth of energy (coal mining btw, I'm thinking of a large machine in Germany). And it's WORTH IT to use that on a net-gain of energy basis. You think you're doing awesome changing to CFLs/LEDs? HA! You are a drop in the bucket.
And that's not even addressing the production problem. When they start deploying mass nuclear (hopefully using LFTR reactors, as that's actually safe, and not a barely-controlled radioactive steam bomb waiting to go off) then call and say you've "solved" the energy problem.
Looks like Finland's experiment is going forward. It's a small test, and falls short of a typical basic income - it won't meet their needs for housing and food, for instance, covering housing for most, maybe, but not all their needs. It's also limited to 2,000 participants who are currently unemployed and will replace their current welfare programs, although they will still be eligible for "in kind" programs provided to all welfare recipients.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-31/finland-s-basic-income-experiment-is-too-timid
http://futurism.com/thousands-to-receive-basic-income-in-finland/
I'll be very interested to see how it pans out, but as a limited test of almost UBI, it'll pave the way for more discussion but won't prove much about UBI or the models that revolve around possible implementations.
However, for the US, Vox points out that we may find a UBI necessary sooner than later:
http://www.vox.com/conversations/20...ome-technology-artificial-intelligence-unions
Of course this is merely one perspective, but I think things are going to have to change because automation of work is accelerating faster than new job types and faster than we can educate workers to enter new fields. Many of the old unskilled labor fields will simply be automated over time - but that's going very quickly. Once trucks are automated it'll be a very quick transition - and poof, there go 5 million jobs. Once burger flipping and frying are automated it'll be a very quick transition and poof, 7% of americans will lose their jobs. I expect these transitions to take a decade or so once the tipping point (cost of automation < cost of worker) is hit for each transition, but that'll be too fast for whole industries of workers to move into new positions, and there simply won't be that many new jobs that use unskilled labor.
If anything it'll create more jobs at the minimum wage line, and more workers vying for such jobs, leaving employers no reason to go above minimum wage.
The only thing I'd like to make certain happens, though, is that it's done at the state level. States with higher cost of living should have a higher UBI, but they'll have the tax base to support it. Further, states will have different ways to tax people rather than just income (though I expect most will be income). Some will choose sales taxes, some tourist taxes, others sin taxes, etc. It's much more flexible and personalized to a given state's situation and population.
For that to work, the federal government would have to make it easy to implement, and would need to provide some small incentive, as well as all the funds the state's normally get for other welfare programs that would be replaced.
I suspect that UBI would end up creating and funding a static lower class in the US, though, but I'm not sure there's a way around that problematic aspect of it. There will simply be people who don't want to achieve anything greater, and many who, for a variety of reasons outside their control, will be unable to.
Of course, once we provide basic income as a human right, people will be expecting entertainment as a human right...
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2016-08-31/finland-s-basic-income-experiment-is-too-timid
http://futurism.com/thousands-to-receive-basic-income-in-finland/
I'll be very interested to see how it pans out, but as a limited test of almost UBI, it'll pave the way for more discussion but won't prove much about UBI or the models that revolve around possible implementations.
However, for the US, Vox points out that we may find a UBI necessary sooner than later:
http://www.vox.com/conversations/20...ome-technology-artificial-intelligence-unions
Of course this is merely one perspective, but I think things are going to have to change because automation of work is accelerating faster than new job types and faster than we can educate workers to enter new fields. Many of the old unskilled labor fields will simply be automated over time - but that's going very quickly. Once trucks are automated it'll be a very quick transition - and poof, there go 5 million jobs. Once burger flipping and frying are automated it'll be a very quick transition and poof, 7% of americans will lose their jobs. I expect these transitions to take a decade or so once the tipping point (cost of automation < cost of worker) is hit for each transition, but that'll be too fast for whole industries of workers to move into new positions, and there simply won't be that many new jobs that use unskilled labor.
If anything it'll create more jobs at the minimum wage line, and more workers vying for such jobs, leaving employers no reason to go above minimum wage.
The only thing I'd like to make certain happens, though, is that it's done at the state level. States with higher cost of living should have a higher UBI, but they'll have the tax base to support it. Further, states will have different ways to tax people rather than just income (though I expect most will be income). Some will choose sales taxes, some tourist taxes, others sin taxes, etc. It's much more flexible and personalized to a given state's situation and population.
For that to work, the federal government would have to make it easy to implement, and would need to provide some small incentive, as well as all the funds the state's normally get for other welfare programs that would be replaced.
I suspect that UBI would end up creating and funding a static lower class in the US, though, but I'm not sure there's a way around that problematic aspect of it. There will simply be people who don't want to achieve anything greater, and many who, for a variety of reasons outside their control, will be unable to.
Of course, once we provide basic income as a human right, people will be expecting entertainment as a human right...
It's not just unskilled labor. One of the ways I've made my career is by touting on my resume how I can reduce overhead by replacing semi-skilled labor (data entry, dispatch, etc) with automation. When I started this job 5 years ago, we had 64 dispatchers, for instance. Automation has let us drop that number down to 6. At a previous job, over the course of one weekend, I'd performed more web scraping/data entry than a team of 14 data entry people had done in the previous six months.
I command a really high salary, but I justify it in interviews that they'll not only make their money back in first year, but that I'll save them 3-5 times what they pay me.
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GasBandit
Staff member
So I guess what that means is "baby steps."
No thanks, hearing "FEED ME!!!!" all the time would be even more annoying then the meowing. And no, choking to death isn't better when it's caused by chocolate.
GasBandit
Staff member
Ok, but who furnishes me the parts for a small japanese car for me to slowly assemble over the course of a summer?
Necronic
Staff member
I have honestly never understood the whole automation therefore UBI argument.
Automation has been making leaps and bounds since the mid-19th century. Like MASSIVE stuff. Everyone seems to think that automation is just robots and computers. Automation has been eliminating jobs and increasing efficiency for generations. And yet there are still jobs for people to do.
THERE WILL ALWAYS BE WORK. Automation eliminates choke points in throughout. Which means that you need to speed up everything else to match it. For instance in my work we have this one reaction that used to take one person 1/4 of a day to do, so 4x per day. We bought a robotics system that allowed us to do 96 of these reactions a day and only needed 4 people to run it.
Was the answer to lay off everyone else? No, you moved them to the upstream and downstream sides of the process, because that now needed to move faster.
Automation is about increasing capacity for the same price, not about doing the same capacity at a reduced price, if that makes sense. So when we increase capacity there will be increased demand *somewhere* for non-automated employees.
This is why we've gone through nearly 2 centuries of continued revolutionary automation and yet people still work.
The only thing that has changed is the speed at which automation changes stuff. In the past this wasnt a big deal. The changes were slow enough and companies were innefficient enough for these jobs to be phased out generationally. Now it's fast enough that someone may train for some new position only to have it disappear in a decade. That's an actual problem that needs resolution and a lot of thought.
And UBI is a straight up nonsense garbage answer to it. It doesn't address the real problem and pretends that automation is some kind of absurd panacea, even though that has never really been shown to be the case.
As someone who works around a lot of automation the idea that it could ever lead us to a "workless" society just tells me people lack the imagination to figure out how to use that new time they were given. If I remove a tedious task from my workflow by automating it I don't just spend that newfound spare time dicking around (I mean I actually do this but I *shouldnt* and no company would consider that acceptable).
Automation has been making leaps and bounds since the mid-19th century. Like MASSIVE stuff. Everyone seems to think that automation is just robots and computers. Automation has been eliminating jobs and increasing efficiency for generations. And yet there are still jobs for people to do.
THERE WILL ALWAYS BE WORK. Automation eliminates choke points in throughout. Which means that you need to speed up everything else to match it. For instance in my work we have this one reaction that used to take one person 1/4 of a day to do, so 4x per day. We bought a robotics system that allowed us to do 96 of these reactions a day and only needed 4 people to run it.
Was the answer to lay off everyone else? No, you moved them to the upstream and downstream sides of the process, because that now needed to move faster.
Automation is about increasing capacity for the same price, not about doing the same capacity at a reduced price, if that makes sense. So when we increase capacity there will be increased demand *somewhere* for non-automated employees.
This is why we've gone through nearly 2 centuries of continued revolutionary automation and yet people still work.
The only thing that has changed is the speed at which automation changes stuff. In the past this wasnt a big deal. The changes were slow enough and companies were innefficient enough for these jobs to be phased out generationally. Now it's fast enough that someone may train for some new position only to have it disappear in a decade. That's an actual problem that needs resolution and a lot of thought.
And UBI is a straight up nonsense garbage answer to it. It doesn't address the real problem and pretends that automation is some kind of absurd panacea, even though that has never really been shown to be the case.
As someone who works around a lot of automation the idea that it could ever lead us to a "workless" society just tells me people lack the imagination to figure out how to use that new time they were given. If I remove a tedious task from my workflow by automating it I don't just spend that newfound spare time dicking around (I mean I actually do this but I *shouldnt* and no company would consider that acceptable).
my whole career's been about designing and implementing automation.
As an example: When a cable company wants to dig in your yard, they have to call in a ticket. Then they have to check that ticket every day to see if it's cleared (all utilities marked). Once it's cleared, they can go out and dig.When I came on board 5 years ago, they did that manually--and that's pretty standard in the industry. Someone would sit at a desk all day, check dig tickets, and then call truck crews when tickets were clear. As more jobs were assigned to us as a contractor, we would have to hire more unskilled labor to perform that task, and it was a linear growth. Every X jobs always meant one more warm body to simply check tickets.
I wrote some software to do that job. Every half hour, a routine checks every open and pending ticket via the web. When the routine detects cleared tickets, it automatically assigns and notifies trucking crews. The two women who had that job got moved to more administrative duties that required more skills and more responsibilities.
Because of the automation, we were able to move from 50 or so technicians on the payroll to over 650 today with the same administrative overhead and less human error. I'd like to think that the processes I made helped create a shit ton of jobs, while also providing a better end result for the home-owner.
So yeah, those two specific jobs were eliminated from the payroll. But everyone (including the people who used to hold those jobs) benefited.
As an example: When a cable company wants to dig in your yard, they have to call in a ticket. Then they have to check that ticket every day to see if it's cleared (all utilities marked). Once it's cleared, they can go out and dig.When I came on board 5 years ago, they did that manually--and that's pretty standard in the industry. Someone would sit at a desk all day, check dig tickets, and then call truck crews when tickets were clear. As more jobs were assigned to us as a contractor, we would have to hire more unskilled labor to perform that task, and it was a linear growth. Every X jobs always meant one more warm body to simply check tickets.
I wrote some software to do that job. Every half hour, a routine checks every open and pending ticket via the web. When the routine detects cleared tickets, it automatically assigns and notifies trucking crews. The two women who had that job got moved to more administrative duties that required more skills and more responsibilities.
Because of the automation, we were able to move from 50 or so technicians on the payroll to over 650 today with the same administrative overhead and less human error. I'd like to think that the processes I made helped create a shit ton of jobs, while also providing a better end result for the home-owner.
So yeah, those two specific jobs were eliminated from the payroll. But everyone (including the people who used to hold those jobs) benefited.
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Apply this logic to say... cooking food or taking orders for said food. It doesn't work the same way; those bodies are at those posts ONLY because you need someone to do the labor. A typical McDonalds employs something like 40-60 people over all it's shifts. You can't make them all managers, shift supervisors, etc...
Automation is a problem when you look at the service industry; many of those people aren't otherwise employable in other fields without massive retraining or expensive education. That's why UBI is an idea: there is a point where the underclass has no economic value except at buyers of product if you automate fully.
Automation is a problem when you look at the service industry; many of those people aren't otherwise employable in other fields without massive retraining or expensive education. That's why UBI is an idea: there is a point where the underclass has no economic value except at buyers of product if you automate fully.
Ya, there always has to be (quite a number of) jobs for the unskilled, because even if you skill everybody, a large number of those skills per year are made obsolete. Unless you pay for all the re-training, you STILL need unskilled jobs in an economy that people can live off of not just be destitute while working.
Dude, sorry, but that's a bad example.
It assumes that the jobs you increased can't be automated, and that there will always be other jobs you can assign those 2 people to.
Hell, for all we know the fact that your company was all of a sudden able to do 650/50=13 times more "hole digging"(?) might have put other similar businesses out of business.
Or it might have not because the demand for dem holes was at such a high level that it could not be physically met and everyone made out like gangbusters...
But if you keep increasing efficiency, at some point you will meet demand, and you will need to cut down on people to increase profits.
Sure, just ask horses about the demand for them since Ford and his moving assembly line.
Automation is still relatively new in the scheme of human history, but eventually (though not as fast as some people think, just like with jet packs and living on the moon) we will end up at a point where we can automate so many things that there will be no more extra room to expand into for the humans (physical universes have that little issue that limits unlimited growth). And that's where the issues will arise. Once we get past that part, and robots do everything, things should fix themselves... or we get Terminator'd.[DOUBLEPOST=1484242986,1484242843][/DOUBLEPOST]
It's a problem there 1st because we're near a point where you can automate it almost fully. But it's eventually coming everywhere.
I don't think we'll get to the "no human labor necessary" point very soon - but we are quickly getting to "no unskilled human labor necessary". It's getting harder and harder to keep people with limited-to-no education usefully/gainfully employed. New jobs created tend to be for higher-skilled or more experienced workers, and/or more creative types, etc. Mind that I'm from a country where people bagging your groceries for you has never been a thing because that would not be considered a sensible job. Already local shops are making do with about 1/4 the amount of cashiers as 10 years ago for the same amount of clients (due to self scanning, auto scanning, automated tills, webshop-and-collecting,...). Office cleaning jobs are starting to diminish as well due to more automation (a regular Roomba may not be able to clean a normal office environment, but there are now Business Roomba's too. Of course they don't do everything, but...).
And sure, someone has to program drones and roomba's, and perhaps repair them and order them around - but that's skilled labor that can't be given to the same lady who used to vacuum the room.
Automation leads to productivity increases and moves people up or down the line - sure. But some *types* of jobs are more easily automated than others (though, to be fair, there's already a computer writing Bach pieces so good musical expers have trouble telling them apart), and that means some types of people have a harder and harder job of getting a job.
And sure, someone has to program drones and roomba's, and perhaps repair them and order them around - but that's skilled labor that can't be given to the same lady who used to vacuum the room.
Automation leads to productivity increases and moves people up or down the line - sure. But some *types* of jobs are more easily automated than others (though, to be fair, there's already a computer writing Bach pieces so good musical expers have trouble telling them apart), and that means some types of people have a harder and harder job of getting a job.
Sure, but Bach didn't get famous by writing music the experts couldn't tell apart from "insert previous famous composer".
True. Computer still needs a base/structure to work from/with. Still, it's one step further than we were before. Plenty of work being done in procedurally generated content and making it look genuine/man-made. We'll see where we are in 10 years' time.
I can agree with this. Unskilled repetitive labor is the first best place to look at for automation.
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And we, as a society, need to figure out what to do with people who are capable only of such. I don't mean this in a demeaning way, by the way - these people may have other skills/qualities/etc that mean they're great parents/neighbours/friends/etc, are the life of the party, and so on. But we have to face the reality that automation is creating (and will create) an unemployable class of people. Or at least, usefully employable. Either we're willing to pay people for non-jobs (though you run into problems of job satisfaction) or we have to support these people somehow while also letting them keep their "pride" for lack of a better term. Sense of self. Something.
Some people may be happy as a "kept" wife/husband, but most/many more don't. Even people with limited resources aren't, therefor, immune to such issues (my girlfriend works with people with mild mental handicaps - "may just about manage to do volunteer work stuffing chocolates in boxes if there's enough oversight" level. These people are incredibly proud that they have a job and can contribute to society, even if, in all honesty, their job is useless. Overseers cost as much/more as just having more self-sufficient people do it. Seeing some of her patients/wards deal with grief, depression, and so on is heartbreaking).
I'm not saying a UBI is the solution. It's a possible venue to explore. I haven't heard much other options - nobody seems to want to be the first to suggest eugenetics as a way of weeding these people out, yet.
GasBandit
Staff member
$870/mo UBI would cost the US around 2-3 trillion a year, alone. That's not a thing that is gonna happen.[DOUBLEPOST=1484249180,1484249063][/DOUBLEPOST]
Not to be a super cynical Sally, but war generally works in that regard.
Really depends on how you treat it. Most version (partially) replace all other kinds of benefits/income from the government (welfare, disabilities, sick leave, pension, child support), and, since wages would likely drop, increase income tax in return. It'd definitely cost money, but - depending on what economist you want to listen to - the cost is more likely to be about a quarter of the actual pay-out.
It really doesn't. Disease has played a much larger role historically that way. War actually doesn't kill nearly as many as you think. Sometimes the "consequences" of war are disease, but that's not always a "sure thing" for correlation. Spanish Flu post-WWI killed more than the war did, and that war (well, the PEACE actually) helped spread it worldwide via soldiers coming home, but it wasn't destruction of services via war that caused the flu to kill so many, it was just the disease itself that did the job.
Google it some more Gas. You might be surprised.
GasBandit
Staff member
We can't exactly institute a policy of disease, though.
WW2 did kill off ~60 million young men (mostly russians and germans), though. Granted, it's not exactly a pandemic, but if you're really looking to keep an underclass employed, war's hard to beat.
Of course, then you eggheads will probably go and automate that, too.