Yup. Just like the economy thread. The leftists are prepared to argue against the rightward perspectives that they’ve already heard and vice versa. Neither one wants to respond to an entirely different economic take.
When discussing climate change, we defer to climate scientists and scoff at what we call climate change deniers. Perhaps we should take the same stance with economic issues and defer to what most actual economists are telling us. What do you suppose that is?
You mean like the experts quoted in the Economist article and the HuffPo bit that I quoted? Or the ones who say what you already believe?
When discussing climate change, we defer to climate scientists and scoff at what we call climate change deniers. Perhaps we should take the same stance with economic issues and defer to what most actual economists are telling us. What do you suppose that is?
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I think we’re talking past each other. I meant that the leftish folks in this thread are only arguing with the right-leaning folk in this thread, and the right-leaning folks in this thread are only arguing with the lefties. And that neither group is engaging with anyone else. Is that what you thought I meant / said?
Not sure this is a left right divide.
Is the leftist take “Jobs are disappearing which will lead to a dystopian future where the 1% own the robots that produce everything and the 99% can’t even find work as slaves” and the rightward take, “Nah, it’ll be fine”?
It seems to me that cheap ubiquitous automated production of practically all goods and services leads inevitably to a socioeconomic system that’s orthogonal to either capitalism or socialism. What’s the need for public ownership of the means of production when the means of production are so widely distributed that everything you could ever imagine is available for free from a magic box in your living room? What’s the need for private property if everything you could ever imagine is available for free from a magic box in your living room?
Just as the Industrial Revolution trashed the existing Feudal socioeconomic system, this upcoming revolution would trash our current world socioeconomic system. What it would look like I have no idea, but it probably won’t be as revolutionary as it would appear at first glance. The seeds of the capitalist era were already present in the feudal era, there were banks and merchants and artisans and guilds and republics in the medieval era, and there were titled aristocrats and absolute monarchs and state monopolies and landlords in the industrial era and still are today. It’s just that the relative power and strength and importance of the different institutions were radically different.
And so in the future world of the future, I expect a lot of stuff is just going to be free to the end user. How it exactly gets paid for is unclear, but producing it and keeping track of every user and making them pay a microtransaction for everything seems silly to me. Maybe there will be a fee system for fabricated stuff, and some people will pay the fees which will support the whole system, but it will be so easy to get around the fees that paying the fees is like hitting the tipjar. Or you print out your new car, but it’s covered in ads, and you have to pay money to get the one without ads. Or it’s paid for by, you know, taxes and is available for everyone, and so if you don’t have a job and don’t pay taxes then it turns out you get it for free. Or maybe the 1% in the future world of the future make so much money that providing a decent middle class existence for the masses via cheap ubiquitous automated production is just a rounding error.
The other thing is that the 1% of the future world of the future aren’t going to be industrialists and financiers and media barons, any more than the 1% of today are feudal landlords. I mean, there are still places in the world where systems like that still exist, the future isn’t evenly distributed. So there will be a few of those people left. But the classes with the real power will be a different sort.
The best proposal I’ve read is Mack Reynolds’ Guaranteed Basic, from the early and mid-60s. Each person is born with shares of stock which cannot be sold, which pays enough dividends to give them a good but not great life. Do something useful and you get more shares. With no one starving, those wanting to pay others to do crap or dangerous jobs are going to have to pay more. Which seems fair. Do something creative that other people want to buy and get more also. I don’t buy as believable a society where anyone can get anything. You are always going to need people to create or supervise, and you’ll have to give them some incentive to do so - unless you think people will do bad jobs for fun.
Think of open source. Back in the days of the C64 I could get little programs on disk for almost nothing - basically the cost of the disk and shipping. They were made by hobbyists, and mostly not very good. Then we moved to big open source efforts, which are good - and mostly sponsored by big companies, and not done by hobbyists in their spare time at all. That may be a good model for lots of things.
Is this similar to a negative income tax?
I’ve posted this before; a while ago I came across a Life Magazine from 1963. One of the main articles was titled Impact of Automation: Its Accelerating Effects have Pushed Our Society to the Point of No Return. It was sounding the exact same alarm as the OP. “Experts”–government, academic, and business–were predicting massive unemployment due to automation. You can read the whole article on Google Books.
Short term yes, long term, maybe not.
I think this is a very likely outcome, long term.
Long term, I think whoever survives will do very well in a post-scarcity society. But short term, I fear the transition will be rough, very rough. Worst case: mass starvation as the One Percent ignores the needs of the displaced workers. This would also entail much conflict and violent suppression of said poor folk by despotic rulers. Could happen easily in Africa and some Asian countries with a tradition of despotic rule and little interest on the part of the rulers in the plight of the poorer folks. Possibly in the Middle East as well, though it will probably be just more of the warfare that seems to go on there constantly. Most European countries seem to have enough social cohesion to avoid this, though the European One Percent does seem to be drifting away from the general populace.
United States is somewhere between Europe and the despotic nations. We aren’t that far gone from democracy yet. (I consider the US at present to be an oligarchy, especially wrt the economic issues that are at the heart of this discussion. So we have a definite potential to slide into despotism.)
Best case: a very proactive effort to take full advantage of human capabilities in the absence of traditional labor. Things like posting on message boards, creating art, etc., become well paid labor for anyone who participates. Dangerous and unpleasant work that robots can’t do becomes very well paid (and eventually, automated.) The One Percent is fantastically rich, everybody has enough food, clothing, shelter and social ability (connected to whatever the Internet will become) and so forth to live happily and well.
Most likely case: a period of massive unemployment, with massive government safety nets eventually deployed (almost certainly fought vigorously by conservatives and libertarians) to prevent widespread starvation and homelessness. Eventual recognition that it’s better to have a prosperous middle class than a permanent desperate underclass, and something like a very generous Basic Income gets instituted. The meanings of “eventual” in all these cases is key. I am not optimistic for the US, at present.
Oh, look someone in the past made a prediction about the future and got it wrong! That means no predictions of a similar nature in the future can possibly be right, no matter how conditions change.
Uhm, no. Many people in the past over and over and over again, at different times have been predicting this demise of jobs due to automation. And they’ve been wrong every single time. So you have a high hurdle to convince anyone that “things are different this time”.
It may indeed be that disruptions will correct over some long term measure of time, but please do not gloss over history. History shows that periods of relatively rapid technological change have in the past often increased income inequality, often dramatically.
Now the hypothesis, called Kuznets curve, is that income inequality thus fostered self-corrects over time, in an inverted U-shape, but it is far from settled that the factors that led to that occurring as agriculture was mechanized, for example, apply to every case. The correction phase depends on trickle-down. How much it applies to the current technologic and global environment (pdf) and how the impact of the observed and extant upswing portion can be reduced is a matter of some academic debate, assuming the downside that we depend on trickle-down for, can indeed be relied upon.
We have never before had machines with functional hands and eyes and error correction. We’re not quite up to human standards in coordinating them together but we’re getting there fast and in the next century there won’t be any need for humans in manufacturing for any company that can spend the capital to replace their workforce with robots.
There will be no need for humans to do any repetitive work.
This pretty much leaves creative work. If we can all find jobs that require a lot of creativity to do them, great. But I am not optimistic.
We face a future with, oh, maybe 95% or more unemployment. I’m sure people can find stuff to do, but not nearly so sure that other people will be willing to pay them for it.
When you are making the exact same argument based on the exact same evidence, it certainly constitutes strong evidence you’re wrong.
But this time IS different, because this time we will have machines that can do EVERYTHING humans do. The brutish, simple machines of the previous era did not have that capacity. What part of that do you not understand?
So the evidence … going back even to the beginning of agriculture … is that new disruptive technology increases social inequality dramatically for varying periods of time, eventually coming back down. In the case of the agricultural revolution it took the Black Death to bring about the change back down the other side of the curve, but hey, it came back down. For the Industrial Revolution it was maybe a hundred years and took governments taking action to remedy it.
As that Economist article continues the recovery from that period of increased income inequality resultant of the technological shift continued into the period after WW2 …
Bolding mine for the TLDNR crowd.
The in-progress Information Revolution, the age of smarter and cheaper machines able to do jobs of increasing skill levels, is as disruptive of a change as either the Agricultural or the Industrial Revolutions. Like those two it is causing increased income inequality. Maybe Kuznets curve will have us coming down the other side sooner rather than later, but history has shown that changing the curve has happened for specific reasons, not actually because trickle-down works.
I do not pretend to know what the correct intervention is. But Pollyannaish wait long enough and it will all be okay is ignoring history not learning from it.
Not quite, since everyone gets universal basic as soon as they are born, rich and poor alike. Though all guaranteed income plans are similar in some ways.
Reynolds, who was a red diaper baby, was also intentionally being extremely capitalistic. No dole, just stock. What can be more capitalistic than that?
ETA: He also nailed the need to not use credit cards to go off the grid, which was pretty good in 1962.
Do you consider sales repetitive work or creative work?
Me too, the left and right aren’t diametrically opposed to humans being outsourced from work. They might argue about how workers are treated but neither will want workers to be made redundant en masse (laptop dictionary are you that stupid? En masse is correct).