No, I don’t. I have a realistic view of humanity, which is that people respond to incentives. If you want people to work, you need to pay them to work.
A lot of people on this board come from privileged backgrounds, where ‘fulfilling work’ means creative white collar work. And because they are relatively high achievers, they assume other people are like them.
I grew up in a family of blue collar laborers. I was the only kid in my whole extended family to go to college. To people like that, work isn’t ‘empowering’, it’s what you have to do to survive. It’s hard, dirty work that is no fun at all. But it’s necessary work, and it’s honorable. Those people have no dreams of being writers or artists - they have dreams of having a boat and fishing instead of working, or just being able to watch TV and drink a few beers.
I can’t find a specific reference to UBI in the bill as introduced. There is a mention of “providing all people of the United States with economic security,” but since the bill also includes, “guaranteeing a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security to all people of the United States,” I have a feeling there is going to be some “service requirement” (either civilian or military) involved - you don’t get money for nothing.
Whether or not free college education for all is included is also subject to interpretation; the closest I can find is, “providing resources, training, and high-quality education, including higher education, to all people of the United States.” Then again, if everybody who wants a college education is entitled to one, I wonder how many of the new universities created to accommodate everybody will be on the level of, say, Trump University?
And I notice the phrase “all people of the United States” used a lot - but not “all citizens and permanent residents.”
Absolutely right, which is why the well-known stereotype of the typical Trust Fund kid getting up at 4am every day to wash the feet of homeless invalids before picking up trash in the local park just won’t go away.
We do what we’ve always done, and create more jobs.
When farming was mechanized, tens of millions of people were displaced. And these people could be described as being the most unlikely to find new work - they were often poor, relatively uneducated, and lived far away from the areas where new jobs were. If there was ever a logical case for giving people a universal income, that was it.
But because we were smarter then, we didn’t do that. So what happened? All those people adapted. They moved to cities, they went to school, whatever. But they all wound up in other jobs.
Now ask yourself what would have happened if someone had said to them, “We feel your pain. It’s impossible for you to survive without our help, so here is an income for life.” What would have happened is that we would STILL have masses of people living on defunct farms, essentially on welfare, but convinced that their lives were hopeless. It would be a cruel thing to do to them in the long run.
We don’t have to guess about this, because we’ve seen it played out over and over again in the inner cities, on native reservations, and anywhere else where people have been incentivized with free money to drop out of society and live off the public purse.
Automation and AI is new technology, you can’t look to the past to see what will happen as this takes over, it has never happened before. Robot workers will be here sooner than you think. Doing more things than you think they’ll be able to do. Better and cheaper too. Are you saying we should just create busy work so that there is something for low skilled people to do?
Don’t you think it would be a good thing if people didn’t have to do menial and physically debilitating work anymore? Wouldn’t that be good for humanity if we were freed from that?
Under the category of “skills and experience”, I was including the ability and willingness to work hard and be a good worker. That’s one more thing that can differentiate you from the faceless masses, and often for someone not terribly bright, it’s their primary differentiator.
The point remains though; wages aren’t set by a company twirling its collective mustaches and deciding to screw the workers, but rather as the collective result of millions of people being hired by companies for various jobs at various pay rates.
For example, I get paid what I get paid, not because my employer chooses to pay me that because they love me; it’s because it’s within the range of what people with my job title and experience get paid out in the wider world. I wouldn’t work for less (and nor would the vast, vast majority of people with my job title and skill set), and they wouldn’t hire me for more than the range (nor would other employers).
But for someone at the extreme lower end, it implies an almost total lack of marketable skill and/or experience. I mean, I worked as a janitor for minimum wage as a 16 year old. It took NO experience or skill whatsoever. If you’re a grown adult and that’s where you are, then you’re literally interchangeable with some dumb-ass kid still in school, so why would an employer want to pay you more? I suspect in the absence of minimum wage laws, the position wouldn’t have even paid that much as there was nothing about it that compelled any special qualifications other than the ability to push a mop or broom.
And businesses think a bit further and figure “why hire a person that I have to deal with not showing up, not doing a good job, stealing, mouthing off, etc… if I can hire a robot that’ll do it every day, on time and well, and that after a relatively short period, I’ll have paid off?” We’ve seen that already in a bunch of industries, and we’re about to see it in a bunch more with the rise of machine learning applications/AI.
I think the point is that if you can work at all, you should be expected to do so. It’s not beneficial for society to subsidize people not to work just because they don’t feel like it, and if all the dire predictions about the workforce being automated come true, we’ll need a lot of people actually working to pay all the benefits for the people who can’t work.
Of course not, we should obviously tax Capitalist Pig billionaires their fair share and use the resultant funds to buy the low skilled workers modest, energy efficient beachfront condos in Santa Monica where they can then use their newfound lesiure hours to reimagine old episodes of “Jake And The Fat Man”, to be set in a classless, utopian, Afrocentric and Transgender-normative future for Netflix and Amazon Prime streaming.
I don’t really think its “dire predictions”. I think a world when people don’t have to clean toilets, dig holes, ruin their backs lifting heavy boxes, or any myriad of other terrible jobs is a good thing. Having less overall work to do as a society is a good thing. Humanity will survive or perish together. I don’t see why we can’t leverage this technology and the incredible efficiencies it will create to better society for everyone. Other than greed of course. That’s probably why we’re doomed.
Then again, if employers can not convince anyone to do a particular job for what the employers consider a “fair” wage the employers just might have to raise wages sufficiently to attract workers willing to do that job.
AI and automation are not going to take all the jobs. Not in our lifetimes. For that to happen you would need an AI with general intelligence, and we are no closer to building that than we were 30 years ago. We don’t even know how to go about achieving that.
I work in factory automation. I know what the state of the art is in AI and automation, and it isn’t what you think it is. We automate things that are extremely well defined and rote. We are nowhere NEAR being able to automate a job like residential plumber or drywaller. We can’t even build robots that can clean your house. Roombas are about the best we can do, and even those have to be given extremely well defined tasks and fail all the time when they come across situations they can’t handle.
Notice the hype around self-driving cars has begun to recede, and manufacturers are walking back their claims for near-term full autonomy. As it turns out, the edge cases are REALLY hard to solve, and so is the fact that these things have to exist in a complex system where not everything can be determined by rules. We may get there eventually with cars, but I think it will be decades, not years from now. And a lot of that depends on how the public responds.
Yes, getting rid of menial and back-breaking labor is a good thing. Working at Wal-Mart beats the hell out of subsistence farming.
I guess this is another case where it is more important that AOC is morally right rather than factually right. Which leads to the question, was she right in the press release and wrong in the bill, or vice versa? As in “okay, technically the bill doesn’t do that but it is a bit of hyperbole to push the bill, because Americans are eager to support those who won’t work”, or “don’t worry, the bill doesn’t actually do what I said it would so you should support it because everybody knows you can’t believe a word I say”.
I didn’t think Trump would be elected, but if the Dems don’t distance themselves from this kind of thing PDQ, he is going to be re-elected by a fucking landslide.
I never said “all the jobs”. I believe I said menial and physically debilitating jobs.
Also, think bigger. Imagine 50 years from now. Think about where our technology was 50 years ago, now imagine that jump from where we are now. Now imagine much much more of a jump because technology advances way faster than linearly.
We have artificial limbs that people control with their minds now. That was star wars shit. Now its reality.
This does feel very Groundhog Day-ish… I keep having to repeat myself- that’s not how it works. Wages are predominantly set as part of a labor market- labor is a “good” just like anything else, and like anything else, it’s sale price is set by the person selling it. If that good is not worth the price, then nobody buys, so the seller has to drop their price.
In the case of low-wage workers, they don’t have skills and experience worth paying more for, and they’re easily replaceable. Hence the low pay- “if you won’t do the job for the pay I’m willing to pay, there are a dozen other people waiting who will.”
That’s not the company being dicks; developing skills and experience (and hard work is definitely a skill) is the main way you differentiate yourself in the job market. Luck plays a large role as well, but as far as things you can control, that’s how you raise the perceived value of your labor. That’s why education is important- it’s a way to differentiate yourself. So are things like summer jobs, internships, etc… And stuff like criminal records also differentiate you, except negatively.
I don’t doubt that some sort of UBI would increase wages for the remaining lowest wage workers- employers would have to raise wages just to compete with the option of being a sloth. But that’s only at the extreme low end; almost nobody making 50k is going to turn around and say “F**k this 50k job, I want to go sit on my ass for 20k.” But it’s entirely likely that someone making 24k might say that. In the long run though, that’s going to drive automation even harder until we reach a point when everything that can be economically automated will be. Whether or not that point is a post-scarcity economy remains to be seen. It may just end up as a situation with widespread impoverished unemployment for most people, and a small “working” class that actually does jobs that can’t be automated.
So what? Of course we will have tech in the future that will be amazing. That says nothing at all about how people will be employed. Maybe 50 years from now the biggest growth industry will be virtual jobs in VR. I have no idea.
What I do know is that until and if we can replace the human brain, human brains will be really valuable. And not just for the technical aspects of the job they are doing, but because when humans are in the job they can use judgement to correct errors, come up with workarounds, provide feedback to managers as to what’s going on at the lowest levels of the organization, etc. Ever seen what happens when a company’s employees go on a ‘work to rule’ strike? Usually, the entire process collapses, or at best becomes highly inefficient. That’s what would happen all the time if you replaced all your workers with specialized robots.
