When all the jobs belong to robots, do we still need jobs?

[shaddack]

@anon50609448

I absolutely promise you that this is not true - that a large number of people would argue that this would be a bad thing. And chiefly among those opposed to it would be people who are already on top who already get anything they want and who define themselves by social dominance. They don’t want everyone else to be as rich as them.

Moral: when attempting to change this, DO NOT ASK FOR PERMISSION!

[bcsizemo]

@anon50609448

I absolutely promise you that this is not true - that a large number of people would argue that this would be a bad thing. And chiefly among those opposed to it would be people who are already on top who already get anything they want and who define themselves by social dominance. They don’t want everyone else to be as rich as them.

I said needs, not wants. Sure I want a McLaren supercar, but I don’t need it. We all need the basics, food, shelter, clothes, running water, electricty, ect… And any decent human being (which some of the top 1% might not qualify for) is going to agree with that. Just like you point out, the “free market” isn’t/wasn’t designed to maximize anything other than the flow of money (or produced goods) from the bottom to the top. The other question that arises from a future of wide spread robot usage is ownership, but that is going to fall into the realm of social issues as well. (When robots grow all our food, who owns the food?)

[anon29631895]

Sheeple y’all just don’t get it – we are the robots!!!

[anon50609448]

@bcsizemo

We all need the basics, food, shelter, clothes, running water, electricty, ect… And any decent human being (which some of the top 1% might not qualify for) is going to agree with that.

Well, this eliminates both of my points of contention. First, by adding the caveat “decent” I think you take some of the haters out. But importantly while I think most people would put in their wish for peace on Earth, that doesn’t mean they agree that an end to poverty is a goal worth working towards. Wave a magic wand, yes. Change anything or take any steps that might work towards that ends? I think you’d find that 10-25% of the population would be adamantly opposed and the rest of us are as likely to argue forever about the how as we are to actually do things.

Plus, do you need electricity and running water (access to clean water, obvious - running water not)? I would say we need rule of law, but I think we’d find a huge amount of people who disagree with that.

[anon68287401]

[Ahmed_Sayid]

Yes but only if you belong in the famous 1% or 0,1%. If not tough nuggets mate.
Because think about it, how will the 1%ers be better than the rest in that scenario?

[Elusis]

@jetfx

The army was deployed against the English peasantry numerous times throughout the 17th and 18th centuries in order to squash resistance to the process of enclosure, where communal rights to the land were systematically eradicated in favour of private landlords. The 19th century was probably the golden age of using armies to open new markets around the world.

Right here in the good old U S of A, even. Government suppression on behalf of markets is practically as American as apple pie.

[spkotzak]

Already happens: Capitalism destroys human labor force and goes to the next phase

Already happens: Capitalism destroys human labor force and goes to the next...

[Kimmo]

@Aetius

Right - I’m sure there was no such thing as economic growth in the Roman Empire, or during the Renaissance.

0.5-1%. Throughout all of history, except the industrial age. Productivity growth has slowed in the developed world, because there’s only so much increased productivity to be had - that’s physics. And the lion’s share of it can be attributed to burning fossil fuels… the developing world is still experiencing rapid growth, but when they finish catching up, that’ll be it for >1% growth.

Physics. The exploitables are finite. Get back to me when we have a space elevator.

[William_Holz]

@anon29631895

Sheeple y’all just don’t get it – we are the robots!!!

Yet we suck at doing the things robots are good at, and are very good at designing robots to do those things.

Burger flipping at McDonald’s isn’t a valuable skill, it only exists due to artificial pressures. If we freed up those people’s minds to solve actual problems and didn’t funnel so many resources in batshit crazy directions we’d be in a far better place.

The puzzle of motivation

[Elusis]

@William_Holz

Burger flipping at McDonald’s isn’t a valuable skill, it only exists due to artificial pressures. If we freed up those people’s minds to solve actual problems

But not everyone is strongest at “problem-solving.” Some people’s skills lie in physical strength, endurance, following directions well, performing repetitive tasks, or mechanical dexterity, just to name a few. Some people are just not that skilled, no matter what training they get - they may be hard working, they may be enthusiastic, but they just aren’t super bright and yet with some supervision and organization, they can do tasks you put them to, whether it’s burger flipping or something else, but they’re not “problem-solvers” per se.

And some of those people take a lot of pride in their work flipping burgers, selling movie tickets, or bagging groceries. The “information economy” doesn’t suggest what to do with them, other than to pretend they don’t exist unless they’re spending their change on some pointless app of the week. Personally, after working in a grocery store while I was All But Dissertation for my PhD and trying to launch my private practice, I gained a hell of a lot of respect for people who do un-glamorous, low-paid work that I should have had before but had failed to develop thanks to my relative privilege.

As far as I can tell, the WPA is pretty much the only extant US example of the government saying “let’s pay people to do things we normally wouldn’t pay for, because there’s no obvious profit in it, but people need jobs and paychecks and society as a whole will benefit.” Hence we got public murals painted, restrooms and other access infrastructure built in national parks, swimming pools and community centers built, schools and libraries built, and federal projects in music, theatre, and historical record preservation and access. There was work for unskilled laborers, work that employed the cognoscenti, and work in between that taught people trades, but little if any of it was work that capitalism was interested in paying for.

A minimum guaranteed income would free some people up to do things they couldn’t before - caregivers to stay home with children or disabled/elderly people, artists to spend more time developing their crafts, students to focus more on higher education. It would not solve the problem that for now, we need people to drive garbage trucks, sort recycling, wipe invalids’ body fluids and take the abuse of the demented, drive long-haul trucks and school buses, pick fruit, stock groceries, make burritos at Chipotle, and do all sorts of other things that are not particularly pleasant but are essential to life as we know it.

(This is also the problem with the “Google Buses” and the rapid gentrification of SF and other places - you still need workers to do all those things in Techlandia; you’ve taken the techies’ cars off the roads but created a horrendous, expensive, resource and time eating commute for the working poor that prop up their lifestyles morning till night.)

[William_Holz]

@Elusis

Some people are just not that skilled, no matter what training they get - they may be hard working, they may be enthusiastic, but they just aren’t super bright and yet with some supervision and organization, they can do tasks you put them to, whether it’s burger flipping or something else, but they’re not “problem-solvers” per se.

Well, half agreed. Most everyone has a useful brain that can do something useful at some task. They may not be excellent at it but there will always be a number of low-level tasks that will never be automatable.

Meanwhile, those tasks that can be automated? No human can compete with that.

There will always be a market for some people who make hand-made human-touched deliberately eccentric burgers, it’s just a tiny fraction of what we currently have. There’s no benefit to society in the artificial demand, nor is there a benefit to society in having humans perform tasks that could be automated. We’re embarrassingly bad assembly line workers.

We’d be far better served if Joe over at Wendy’s was learning something useful, filling a void that actually needed to be filled (health care anyone?) or, once we run out of actual work that needs to be done and can’t be automated (all the way down to elder care and janitorial work, of course) even playing a game…though if we’re going to pay somebody to play a game how about that one that uses people to fold proteins in ways that computers just will never be that good at?

@Elusis

As far as I can tell, the WPA is pretty much the only extant US example of the government saying “let’s pay people to do things we normally wouldn’t pay for, because there’s no obvious profit in it, but people need jobs and paychecks and society as a whole will benefit.”

Yeah, here in the US we’re awful at connecting people with work that needs to be done. How many person-hours (as a ratio) with all the people you know are directly connected to something people want/need done? Similarly, we’re kind of stuck in the 40-hour work cycle because people need stability and the system doesn’t grant it unless somebody’s working or is with somebody who has enough of a buffer to cover it. Given our resources this is madness, and we force people to spend far too much of their lives in terror. I personally consider it criminal.

We’ve discovered there is no magic capitalism fairy and while there are narrow productivity gains in certain fields due to the competition our existing economic system does far more damage by artificially manufacturing scarcity (among other things) than it achieves in any blanket way.

I’m not saying socialism is the answer (I’m far more a fan of creating a corporation that requires a reasonable standard of ethics, provides whole-life solutions to people and contains a large number of alternative governments designed by the employees within it’s hollowed out shell… sort of a Valve/Mondragon/Company Town hybrid), just that our current system is spectacularly inefficient

This isn’t a bad thing, The fact that only a tiny fraction of our actual work is useful is a positive in the end, because it means we have a massive buffer…but it only turns good once we do something with it.

[anon47741163]

The only way jobs can be allowed to vanish, is if some other arbitrary institution can take its place for keeping the proles in line. Work is less and less about getting things done, more and more about keeping people too busy to cause trouble. (Otherwise you’d expect the market to fins a balance between time on the job and productivity.)

It’s not unreasonable to imagine insurance companies stepping in to that role- misbehave too often, and lose your coverage. But that’s a leash only some of us can now afford to wear.

[Jeffery_J_Smith]

If you want to live in the privacy of your own home, won’t you need that right and to own the house? And what about the land beneath it? And the land beneath the factories? And the land above those resources? And the locations in the EM spectrum? Somebody does and will own all those valuable aspects of nature. Which is fine. But should they keep the rents for those valuable locations or pay them?

By analogy, you may have a child, but do you own that child’s labor? Even after paying so much for the child’s upbringing? A better example. You park downtown or at a park in the country, because space is limited and the people excluded by your presence deserve compensation. Similarly, you as an owner of land would not keep the rent from your community but pay it to your neighbors, just as they would pay you.

Everyone would pay land dues (like land taxes) into the public treasury and get rent dividends back (like Singapore does). Plus, extra awesome is this: as technology progresses, it pushes up site values; look at Silicon Valley. So if your society is recovering and sharing those values, then the farther hi-tech advances, the fatter your dividend check grows. Finally, it would not matter at all how many jobs disappear — and property rights could stay the same. More at Progress.org.

[anon50609448]

@Jeffery_J_Smith

But should they keep the rents for those valuable locations or pay them?

This is the big problem with the current system. Built in the assumption that if you have more deserve to get even more. Owners get rents, stock holders get profits, and workers get wages. Lots of land = lots of rent. Lots of stock = lots of profits.The reason it is this way is not because it makes any kind of sense, but because people who have a lot also have outsized political influence.

[Jeffery_J_Smith]

So let’s win that citizen’s dividend, as Singapore has to some extent, and the Swiss will vote on. Join us at Progress.org.