This is an interesting point. I’d never thought of the Alaska Permanent Fund as a UBI, but in a way I suppose it is. As you noted, it doesn’t pay enough to be anything close to a “living wage”, but it is like a mini-UBI.
Lots of perfectly workable things “can’t” get passed into law because the people running the show at the time they’re proposed don’t like them.
“Can’t get passed”, in this context, is exactly equal to “is disliked by several people”.
It couldn’t be a lack of funds. Enrollees were receiving a check in lieu of the unemployment benefits they would otherwise receive. While that almost certainly comes out of a separate pot of funds, the net effect can’t be that big.
I just gave you an example of one that’s operating now, albeit in a pilot phase, and provincial, not national – but provincial is how single-payer health care started, another program that conservatives like to claim nobody could possibly afford, which has been running nationally for half a century.
More information on the government site here, including links to a discussion paper.
The real problem with UBI is that for it to be anything but an income redistribution program it has to have enough of a goods and services base to provide a consistent revenue stream sufficient to support it, and this essentially requires enough automation that a “tax on robots” is not prohibitive for business profitibilty. Right now that doesn’t exist, and there is little incentive for the wealthy to support an onerous tax on their income and wealth to support it.
However, the United States has had a limited form of basic income for years in FICA and Social Security, and while the system isn’t perfect it hasn’t fallen apart or broken the back of the economy, and despite pronouncements of imminant failure since the ‘Eighties it is still chugging along. The Alaskan Native Regional Corporations also provide what is essentially private basic income subsidy. So the notion that UBI is somehow inherently unworkable is provably untrue.
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That’s interesting, because the Finnish project wasn’t even close to a real basic income program. It’s a generous and less ristrictive welfare program. Reading the OP’s article, it looks like they were supposed to add working people to the project (and thus be reasonably close to n actual basic income project) before they chickened out.
The Ontario pilot study is a perfect example of how pilot studies can be absolutely worthless when trying to evaluate a policy that will be applied to the entire population.
Ontario is choosing a small number of people who agree to take part in exchange for participating in focus groups and surveys, etc. They will be watched very carefully, and the program is temporary. These people may not be representative of Ontarians as a group, and they certainly aren’t going to have the same incentives and behaviors while actively participating in a program where they are being monitored.
This reminds me of educational pilot studies where motivated children and their motivated parents take part in new educational stratgies. Great results are announced, the program roles out nationwide - and utterly fails.
The big risk of a UBI is that it will have a large moral hazard associated with it, in that it will reduce the desire to work among certain members of the population. It will create unemployment and incentivize those at the bottom to stay at the bottom and never develop the skills or work experience to do better. Then we will have yet another permanent underclass.
Canada already has plenty of experience with a UBI - we give one to Native Canadians on reservations. That has not worked out well, and has had the effect of incentivizing them to stay on reservations where they get poor schooling and don’t learn how to assimilate and be successful in the Canadian economy. So they become a permanent underclass.
We also gave one to fishermen in the east to compensate them for seasonal work - which had the effect of preventing economic adaptation and the development of an off-season economy like you see in Maine. So they became a permanent underclass.
Here in Alberta, we were the last political jurisdiction I know of anywhere with a Social Credit government. Social Credit is basically a UBI type scheme where people are paid a regular stipend just for living in the province. It was all the rage once, and now it’s completely gone. Because it didn’t work, other than as a mechanism for driving giant deficits.
I’m not so sure. I don’t think we can imagine what a post-automation world will look like any more than Ancient Rome can imagine a post-Industrial Revolution Great Britain. That is to say, the concept of “work” or a “job” as some physical location where you drag yourself every morning so you can repeatedly perform some stupid task you care nothing about will fundamentally change.
Automation of physical labor created more jobs because of the need for people to figure out how to break processes down into manageable steps, and diverted what had previously been subssistiance agricultural workers into intellectual labor and service jobs. The difference now is that machine intelligence threatens to take over intellectual labor tasks and essentially replace human workers in a wide array of industries. We’ll still need intellectual workers for certain jobs and in socially-oriented positions, but it is hard to see how that is going to create enough real work for all the corporate McJobbers and service workers who are no longer needed.
I suspect a lot of work is going to look like whatever the future version of webbloging and Instagramming will be, and will be subsizied in some fashion by the productivity of machine intelligence-based automation rather than generating anything of saleable merit. And even with something like universal basic income, there is going to be increased stratification between the very wealthy and the masses, with the minority of value content creators being somewhere in the middle.
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Kinda depends on how stuck we are on the constipated Calvinism that insists that we are supposed to toil and suffer for our daily bread. I mean, sure, maybe you do have to suffer to sing the blues, but if you don’t want to sing the blues? OK, maybe not a pass, but a discount?
None of this will be possible until we learn how to build a general intelligence, and we don’t know how to make a general intelligence. We don’t know if we even can. And until there is general intelligence, you need people all through the economy.
You have no idea how hard it is to automate a single factory, or to even digitize their workflows. You are greatly underestimating how much lateral communication, feedback, creativity, judgement and other qualities are required of workers in the economy.
Then there’s all the manual and physical labor that we cannot easily replace with automation. We can’t today make a bunch of robots that work together as a construction crew to build a house. We don’t even have generalized robots that can clean windows.
You underestimate how much value and knowledge is created when humans in the course of their jobs talk to other humans. People discover market opportunities, they learn about hiring conditions in other regions, gain information about suppliers, you name it. They share best practices, and discover simpler and better ways to do things. They make deals, and they come up with workarounds to problems no one thought of before. Salesmen learn what customers need, and engineers visit customer facilities to determine how to optimize them.
And when you put millions of people together all engaging in manufacturing and commerce, you get emergent systems that are necessary for it to function well. Prices, for example. Supply chains. Distributor networks. Local stores with products optimized for local demand - demand discovered perhaps by a human who started a businesses and who first worked as an employee in the same market and discovered information about local demand that no one else had.
And so it goes. Our entire society and economy is a series of interlinked complex systems functioning as something greater than the sum of its parts. To believe that you can replace that with AI in any sort of reasonably near future is just ludicrous. What’s actually going to happen is unknown, but it will almost certain be incremental, fairly slow, and pretty bumpy along the way. And it may never happen at all if we discover that the type of AI we need is fundamentally different and our current techniques do not remotely lead to it.
We have been advancing technologically for hundreds of years, and with each new technology people have claimed that jobs will be lost. Yet here you are with hundreds of millions more citizens, and with massive industries destroyed by change multiple times, and yet there is near record low unemployment. Of course, this time is different. Just like it was different all the other times - until it wasn’t.
Universal automation and general intelligence are not on anyone’s radar screen right now. There are no engineering companies with a plan for building them. We don’t know how. Or even if we can. Until we do, it’s all rampant speculation.
Is that going to matter when we can 3-d print the entire house?
Actually, I do know how hard it is to automate a production line and get it to provide a consistently quality product because I have done exactly that. And you are are correct that it is expensive to do, particularly if you are doing it on a piecemeal basis. However, if you have enough automation technology that the process of developing new automation is essentially stacking blocks together it becomes rapidly more easy. The first CNC milling machines were vast, expensive devices that required regular maintenance and human part handling and someone to sequence them so that they could actually build a part correctly. Modern CNC mills are so well automated and self-diagnostic that a single technician can run a shop floor of them, and modern 3D MCAD software can pretty effectively optimize sequencing with minimal human guidance. The same is true for most other forms of automation, and the hurdle isn’t that it isn’t technically possible but that no one has put in the effort and funding to automate processes.
Although artificial general intellegence would be needed for creative work (and I mean that in the general sense of interpreting complex data, not just writing music or crafting sonnets), there is plenty of intellectual labor that does not require creativity and is essentially process-oriented. We haven’t bothered to automate such work because people are cheap and there is little incentive, but looking at technologically advanced nations with employment shortages like Japan shows that many of the jobs we employ people to do can be readily done by non-intelligent machines, and many other jobs require a fairly narrow set of intellectual skills.
Even in jobs that require high degrees of logical abstraction or interpretation such as science, medicine, and law the use of fairly limited heuristic learning systems can greatly reduce the grunt work involved in literature searches, data analysis, and document reviews, which means there is less need for junior associates to do tedious reviews and rewriting of legal briefs or for medical technicians to do administrative work. An example of that is in medical X-rays; the handling, marking, and filing of X-ray film used to require several people per facility and take up a large storage volume that required a librarian. Now all X-rays are computer images which are automatically marked and stored in HIPPA compliant digital database systems, and a facility that would employ several dozen technicians can now be run with just a handful.
We’re not going to see intelligent computers take over all professional work in the next few decades, but there are a lot of the ‘simple’ office-type jobs that fairly basic machine intelligence or even just flexible non-intelligent automation systems will make obsolete, and there isn’t any clear area where jobs requiring comparable intellectual skills will replace them. Prognostications about the future of employment are nearly always short-sighted and new industries can rise up where virtually no one imagined them, but it is pretty easy to see that there are a lot of lntellectual labor jobs that can be done with only fairly minor advances in and applications of technology.
Additive manufacturing (3D printing) is one of those technologies that, while providing some amazing capabilities, has been so ludicrously oversold in the public consciousness as to be laughable. No one is going to 3D print a house unless it is a plastic dollhouse. We could, however, redesign how houses and other structures are constructed to make them more amenible to being made as prefabricated components in factories and capable of being constructed by a largely automated ‘workforce’ of purpose designed construction equipment.
We haven’t done so because there is a large pool of labor that will construct a house relatively inexpensively versus the vast capital cost of developing the infrastructure to automate it, but objects like shipping containers are built in largely automated factories now that cut, handle, weld, and assemble the containers with minimal human labor other than finishing and inspection. However, no robot existing or on the visible horizon is going to do fine finish carpentry to install cabinets or make tasteful decisions about flooring and wall colors. And nobody wants to live in a house with the aesthetic qualities of a CONEX. We’ll always need people for social contact, and there are many jobs where the “human touch” is as crucial as any process or service. Even with automation and augmentation there will almost certainly be large growth in areas such as health care and elder care just because of that.
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Errm…they already can.
A lot of people do not really care about the “aesthetic qualities” when it gives them a roof they don’t currently have.
Also, am I the only one who really doesn’t see anything aesthetically wrong with that house?
Factory built modular homes have existed for years, maybe decades.
It beats a McMansion.
For some reason, given the small size for a standalone house, I’d actually prefer it to a smaller version of a 2-story suburban home. It’s by no means a stone-and-thatch cottage, but it’s classy.
That “house” doesn’t have a kitchen. And it’s not clear how they would have printed the plumbing, electrical and HVAC system. I doubt they did. That house is so sparse, it could be built by a small, skilled construction crew in a few days using prefab parts.
Yes, prefabs have been around but they’re still made with largely human labor, and emplacement and assembly is scarcely automated. Part of this is due to construction codes but it is mostly the result of it being relatively cheap to pay for labor versus developing the complex infrastructure for automated manufacture the way the automobile industry has. Cars are a somewhat ideal candidate for automation because carmakers build hundreds of thousands of identical units out of modular components, whereas houses are somewhat more unique, with certain features varying based on site conditions and with a lot of finish work that requires some judgment and finesse that is not readily automated.
But with prefabrication design intended to support automated assembly with human oversiht and limited direct labor home construction could be predominantly automated, reducing the labor workforce in construction. There is just no real reason to do this right now because there is plenty of labor and thr major costs in home construction are land, materials, and finish labor that requires human judgment and flexibility.
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