I was listening to an episode of The Weeds podcast several weeks ago when one of the speakers pointed out that Tucker Carlson of all people had actually floated the idea of banning automation. I’ll be honest in that I had never before even considered such idea; I’ve basically been operating under the assumption for years that the coming automation-induced unemployment explosion - while overblown in a lot of ways - is nonetheless largely unavoidable. Consequently, the idea of just banning the practice - or just establishing a line over which the robots cannot cross (so, for example, no self-driving trucks) - might actually yield more broad social benefits than downsides.
I.e. for all the talk of UBI being a way around the automation bubble - and it’s a proposal that I support! - it is no coincidence that UBI’s greatest proponents are all emanating from Silicon Valley; the tech sector has a vested interest in ensuring that the automation technologies that it is inventing do not spur a consequent crackdown on automation writ large. If we were to just ban automation, then the political issues surrounding UBI could be put to rest because the policy itself would not be necessary.
You want to ban business from using technology and maximizing efficiency?
I think the best thing we can do as a society is get over this idea that everyone must work a job to have value. There are many ways to contribute to society without earning a paycheck from an employer. If we can increase efficiency to where not everyone has to work to live, then to me that’s a good thing. Less overall work that needs to be done for society to function well is a good thing.
Banning automation would destroy millions of high paying, high value jobs, and replace them with grunt work for low pay. Products would decline in quality, and go up in price. Exports would collapse.
But hey, maybe weavers will make a comeback. It took a couple of hundred years for the Luddites to get their way, but now we can all go back to working back-breaking labor for subsistence. Go team.
This idea is totally, ridiculously daft. Either Tucker is trolling, or he’s had a stroke and is spouting gibberish.
Oh, and the robots aren’t taking our jobs. Nor will they. The Robot Apocalypse is just the latest in a string of existential scares some people seem to need to get them through the day.
I’m pretty sure that turning a doorknob instigates an automated process that pulls a latch back. You’ll have to be rather specific about what processes are disallowed if you’re going to do this.
I would like to see you get into your time machine and explain to our ancestors about how the species in a far-future time frame will develop the technology to let us attain our goals without us having to extend any effort – or at least very little – and that we want it BANNED because that would be a BAD THING.
This structure that we call an “economy” has lost touch with reality. It isn’t rational. It has become quite contrary to our interests. It makes no fucking sense.
It’s not the economy that is irrational and contrary to our interests - it’s our ‘thought leaders’ who want to take their irrational ideas and use them to control the economy.
This is an idiotic idea, and Tucker Carlson is an idiot for proposing it. Yes, banning automation would result in more people working, and that’s precisely why it’s a bad idea. Nobody wants to work. People say sometimes that they want work, but what they usually mean is that they want a paycheck, and banning automation would decrease that.
Beg to disagree. The economy creates the situation where we collectively seriously consider it to NOT be in our best interests to save ourselves from mind-numbing time-consuming labor, because it (the economy) is founded on the notion that there’s shitload of work that needs doing, a scarcity of hands to do it, and not enough food and other essential resources to go around, so “ya don’t work ya don’t eat”.
We now have not enough WORK to go around (unless we slice it into smaller chunks), a surplus of available people to do it, and a bounty of food and other resources and little need to be fighting over it. I repeat: the economy is not in touch with reality any more.
Pretty much this. We definitely don’t want to ban automation…that’s impossible, any way, especially if you aren’t god ruler of the world who can rule by fiat. Even if we banned automation, no one else would, and what you’d get is a worse version of what happened to Japan before the US forced open their ports and markets and dragged them kicking and screaming back into the rest of the world.
Basically, what I expect is something like a BLS system at some point, though I think that the fears about automation taking all the jobs is vastly overblown (as they have been historically for, well, centuries now). Personally, I think that unused labor will be used by someone to do something at some point. Also, I think that the very idea of what a ‘job’ is continues to be in flux, and that the new connectivity will give nearly endless opportunities for folks to create and consume content. But, at some point I expect that something like a basic living standard will also play a role, with everyone receiving some stipend for basic living necessities (housing, food, clothing, entertainment, etc) and then freeing people to do other, creative things with their time instead of some work grind. AI, automation, all of those things are going to provide a world where you won’t need to work, at least not in the traditional sense of a 9-5 job punching a time clock and working in the coal mine.
Not unless you get the whole world to ban it, which won’t happen so why bother. This answer seems so out there even for Carlson that I can’t believe he’s serious. We won’t be competitive if we ban automation. Being luddites isn’t the answer. We have adapted to several innovations in business. This will be no different.
Remember that this is the guy who thought that a “kilometer” (and other metric units) was some foreign concept that the US should avoid, so I wouldn’t look to him for any sensible idea.
Actually, all throughout history the “economy” has been telling us the following: there is X amount of work that needs doing, and it must be done. If you find ways to do it more efficiently, you don’t need to invent more work; you instead get your evenings and weekends off. You don’t have to send your children and geriatrics into the mines; it’s okay for them to stay home. Workload is in a tug of war with free time and leisure.
If we have reached the point where there isn’t enough work to go around, that’s the economy telling us that some people don’t need to work at all. The other people have it covered; everybody else can relax. In an extreme case, our robot overlords have it covered and everyone can relax.
If we’re decent human beings, we realize that neither murdering the surplus population nor leaving them to starve in poverty is a decent thing to do. This, of course leads to the idea of taxation of the producers to fund a UBI of some sort - some of the surplus production is siphoned off the top and distrubuted to the masses. If we’re so incredibly efficient that we can produce everything we could possibly want and still have idle hands, we as a society can certainly can afford to do this - it’s a logical certainty.
Of course, we only have a reason to do this if we’re decent human beings. That’s not an given, of course.
This is Luddite-ism. This would be like people from a century ago wanting trains, airplanes or whatnot banned because they put existing forms of transportation out of business. Or people who wouldn’t want the Internet or smartphones because they make so many other forms of communication obsolete.
Tell you what, why didn’t we do this 20 years ago? Or 50? Or 100? Do you know how many people lost their jobs during either industrial revolutions? Or when we started using animals for labor?
Oh, but this time, it’s completely different. Just like every other time. Just like in 1995 when there was going to be The End of Work The End of Work - Wikipedia or in the early 1800s Luddite - Wikipedia
Alternatively, you could mandate that everyone has to work with a hand tied behind their back. That way, you would either need to hire twice as many people or they’d take twice as much time to complete a task, increasing employment.
Good news! The working age population of the world is declining. So the fact that automation is going to take over some of the work that previously humans would have done is a good thing, because there’s actually fewer humans to go round.
Of course, being humans, apparently our reaction to these two facts is to have simultaneous moral panics about how we’re not going to have enough people for the work because population decline, and also we’re not going to have enough work for the people, because automation. Because that’s smart!
