Well I don’t know enough about it to tell you how it will work. Certainly we have managed shifts in work force in the past, i.e. the increase of the service industry, people needed to service the new gadgets, etc., albeit with some growing pains.
I understand your pessimism with how large companies operate. I mean ultimately if MOST jobs are obsolete, there would HAVE to be some other system, as if most people don’t have jobs, they can’t possibly buy the goods you are automating to create.
In the middle of the change, perhaps there will be a shift and growth in other industries as certain fields are phased out, similar to the past.
Simply put, it is really hard, for me at least, to see how it would work because everything is going to be different. And one can’t really apply TODAYS mindset and way of doing things when there is going to be such a dramatic shift.
I think it would be like going back to the days of Serfdom and Feudalism and telling them today about our global market economy and how people don’t have a Godly appointed ruler and vote in representative etc. They would call you mad.
So its weird to me that Historian has 44% chance of being robot-ed, but my job is “totally safe”.
Also apparently I need to ask for a raise! LOL
But seriously, there is no reason for my job, just job solely exists because people like talking to other people, and our administratives systems are badly designed, user un-friendly, and not linked in any meaningful way. (Seriously, our hiring software only just got linked with our HR software THIS YEAR we had two stand alone systems before!) We have described my job as “knowing where to click” - looking up a tenure profs PD account to see how much he had left, took 37 clicks. Thats dumb. I’m happy I have my job, and it pays my mortgage and I have pension, but it should be automatized, it shouldn’t be “safe”. But historian? How can that be automatized?
Which laws? Which rights? Which ideals? And how is the current laissez-faire capitalist system running counter to the (very capitalist-friendly, for incumbents) controls I envision?
After all, if we’re so much more wealthy and free than China and Russia why, like them, do we have so many citizens who (often along with their children and grandchildren) still can’t make it past the lowest tier of Maslow’s pyramid? I’ll allow that Americans (especially white male ones) enjoyed an exceptionalist period during the post-war economic anomaly, but that ended 10-15 years ago and the middle class that has the luxury of caring most about those laws and rights and ideals is ending with it.
No, I’m sorry to say those restrictions would work very well within the current context of our Reaganite political-economic “ideals” and the laws that emerge from them thanks to lobbying orgs like ALEC – rights give little relief. Now perhaps they’re not plausible within the context of a Scandinavian or Continental type of Western democracy, but those kinds of systems are more likely to (but will also have less need to) implement the sort of unrestricted UBI that would go hand-in-hand with Fully Automated Luxury Communism.
My job (Electrical Engineer) has a 10% chance of replacement.
Fair enough, I live in theory land anyway for the most part. I’m not an EE tech, but a signal processing engineer. Why don’t I move further into theory land and become a mathematician?
No, not just because we wished for it, it requires certain technological advances to be achieved, which requires a lot of work. Advances that are not inevitable, but which would change the rules of the game if they happened, the current politics become irrelevant in that situation.
Not everyone is on board with a UBI, and as @gracchus noted in his link, it could very well be not nearly as helpful as we’d like.
@gracchus’s scenario reads more like dystopian science fiction than a likely outcome to me. my scenario might sound too much like utopian science fiction, but at least it’s based on the premise that the things that have happened throughout history to now will continue to happen into the future, nothing more really (and admittedly there’s no certainty to that, past events are simply indications of what might come to pass, they’re not natural laws, I don’t believe in historicism).
For the vast majority of humanity the modern age has created the most wealth and least poverty compared to any other time in human history. Western Liberal globalisation has been the greatest system of poverty reduction the world has ever seen. Even since the recent financial collapse poverty hasn’t being on the rise (on a global scale, there are lots of local fluctuations within that of course), it’s still going down, it’s only relative inequality that has been increasing (which isn’t the same thing at all).
Well, obviously it’s just my opinion, and yours is as good as mine. But I am familiar with the process of recording oral histories, and the most limiting factor is usually the time the interviewer can spend with the interviewee. Meanwhile, we already have the technology to map the person’s lifespan against significant events and ideas, against what people are searching for, and also, yes, to take note of an interesting opening and go from there. The field of speech recognition and analysis is currently in an explosive developmental phase, that initially kicked off when IBM open sourced 30 years of research about a decade ago and has been accelerating ever since, and right now my employer has machines that can converse with humans while analyzing their voice stress patterns and content in real time. We can literally tell not just what you are saying, but how you feel about it, with some accuracy.
But in the end, the robot is just going to deliver vastly more information than a human interviewer. It’s not going to be able to optimally shape that information for re-absorption by other minds, it won’t be able to transfer the impact and relative meaning of the history the way a real historian can. Or at least I don’t see that happening in my lifetime - historians who can write well are very safe!
I agree. But remember the age of cheap energy is already ending, and we’re about due for a global plague, too. We haven’t had a big die-off since AIDS hit, and AIDS, for all its horror, is a slow plague. If the Spanish Flu comes back (fun fact for @mister44, the Spanish Flu actually originated in Kansas!) our current population and employment crises might well look like paradise.
Then again, the idea of a demented reality star actually attaining the most powerful political office in the land was reserved for the province of dystopian SF stories up until five years ago. But here we are.
Your restrictions would likely be unconstitutional for a start, both in the US and in many European countries, for countries without written constitutions there are large bodies of laws relating to freedom of expression, protection of private property, antitrust laws, laws protecting free commerce; they wouldn’t get past the ECJ either.
It was illegal in both the USA and Britain to publish “news damaging to morale” at the time. In the USA any honest reporter would get a 20 year prison sentence, I seem to recall.
So the first country the flu hit that had a reasonably free press was Spain, and consequently they got blamed for it.
Various people have bent themselves into pretzels attempting to dodge the US’s responsibility for failing to respond intelligently to the plague and for spreading it globally, but the fact remains that the first confirmed outbreak was at Fort Riley, and the first diagnosed case was in Kansas, and there’s no indication (other than poorly supported theories) that it came from outside the USA.
The US government and press continued to insist that “all is well” even while priests drove open trucks heaped with bodies through the streets of Philadelphia every day and infants starved because every adult in their building had died. It’s likely that some small towns in Kansas saw 90% of their populations die off, although we really don’t know for sure. And the US government shipped infected soldiers to every part of the world.
Which clauses or amendments of the U.S. Constitution are violated? Freedom of expression isn’t the right to buy whatever staple or consumer good you want from whomever one wants. Private property laws aren’t being violated – people are being encouraged to buy and own* stuff. Anti-trust and free commerce laws aren’t being violated, either, because no merchant is being prohibited from buying a UBI point-of-payment terminal.
Technicalities, you may say, but technicalities are the reason that the American ideals you describe are regularly violated when it’s convenient for our ownership class. That’s been the Republican philosophy of law-making for at least 35 years.
As I said, it probably wouldn’t pass muster in Europe, but what I’m describing is a very American UBI.
[* while the Lexmark decision is a major step in the right direction, the shrink-wrap license model of “ownership” isn’t going away]
Guess you missed my comment about the Lexmark decision. Somehow that doesn’t change the fact that there are restrictions and controls on how SNAP benefits are used.
You call it “unfair advantage,” I call it “being able to pay the market rate” – American conservatives since forever.
Citizens United equates money with free political speech. The people who promoted it are definitely not ones who’d take advantage of a nebulous unintended consequence and leverage it against the kind of UBI system I describe – unless they’re the kind of conservatives who’d refuse to consider a UBI of any sort, but we’re not talking about them.
The Lexmark ruling is closer to what you’re describing as an impediment to that kind of UBI, but we still have shrink-wrap licenses and one-sided take-it-or-leave-it contracts for products and services that we sometimes can’t do without.
That’s irrelevant, it’s the constitution, if someone tried to implement such a law the other people would just take a case to the supreme court. The unconstitutionality of your law would be so obvious to everyone that it would never get that far in the first place.
What “other people”? Who do you think makes the laws in this country, and makes sure that they’re technically within the bounds of the Constitution? Citizens United is a good example of the kind of result you get from them.
Don’t get me wrong, I hope that this nasty neoliberal UBI doesn’t come to pass. But if we’re going on the assumption that an American UBI would be passed as one of the remedies to the externalities of automation it would have to get buy-in from the conservative establishment and neoliberal-lite Dems (the people who make the laws in this country). If you think the likes of Mitch McConnell or Paul Ryan or even Hillary Clinton would approve the idea of every citizen of the U.S. being handed $20k/annum completely unrestricted then you haven’t been paying attention.
