Basic income

I don't know about the US but in Germany you could start paying every adult EUR 1000 a month *right now*, without raising any taxes, by dismantling the evaluation bureaucracy for the unemployed (Hartz IV), which is broken anyway. But, everyone seems to believe that people would quit their job immediately if you gave them free money. And by "everyone" I mean bullheaded rural protestant fundamentalists.

oh u have those too?

somehow tying the arguments for UBI to the inevitable robot takeover of all work just seems to taint it with even extra fringiness. I may have to start distancing myself if the techno-utopians start seriously adopting basic income as a plank. it's like when frat boys started liking techno

no one tell tom abt edm

'robots/AIs taking our jobs' is a dumb or at least overhyped reason to be pro-UBI imo however some degree collective economic anxiety is a necessary condition for it being implemented politically. welfare is unpopular because people who pay into it don't see themselves as ever potentially being beneficiaries. the middle and upper middle classes who will pay for it need to feel that they may actually someday need it, so it becomes like insurance. or we lift the wreath of false consciousness and shed all individualism, whichever comes first

imo robots taking jobs is untrue in the sense that machines have been taking jobs for ~150 years and there have always been new jobs for people to do, but robots taking jobs is true in the sense that they disrupt stable jobs and toss ppl out mid career into an uncertain world where they are often poorer than they were before, if robots started taking jobs faster than ever before then it really cld add up to some sort of calamity even if its not the end of work

yeah like obviously the computer revolution and automation in manufacturing displaced a lot of people, but didn't create enough widespread economic anxiety for a mass popular movement for universal social insurance. the next automation wave would have to an order of magnitude larger, and technology-wise they are really far away from getting robots to do the stuff people in rich countries do now. also part of me wonders like, if they just hadn't named it Machine Learning, would people be so freaked out? it conjurs the image of a machine that actually learns stuff when it's just clever statistics

werent you arguing that the majority of 'the stuff ppl in rich countries do now' is economically unnecessary garbage? i mean theres a whole host of automation that hasnt happened not because its technologically impossible but because its not economically (or sometimes in the case of high-prestige white collar work culturally) practical. i mean i think the real fear for workers shouldnt be machines getting smarter, its machines getting cheaper

machines getting sexier imo

haha i read that post and remembered there was a spike jonze (?) movie about a guy that wanted to fuck his iphone and just started laughing out loud. the future man, crazy

they don't know how to make a robot that can fold a t-shirt in less than 36 hours or walk up a flight of stairs or cut hair and those problems are considered exponentially more complicated than getting a computer to add two numbers together or to repeatedly insert identical pieces of metal into each other. humans just come pre-programmed to know how to do these things (thx God!) but even our genius engineers don't know how to teach a robot how to do it

i mean there's no point for us to speculate on the future of technology except that it's amusing but in terms of automation we've already picked a lot of the low-hanging fruit and the next automation revolution is far away, not necessarily in terms of years but like conceptually, computationally. best hope for UBI is economic stagnation not technological singularity IMO

tbh maybe the outsourcing/min-maxing of efficiency will take place in the government someday and we'll outsource taxes/welfare processing to a northern european company that just institutes it for us

xpost

Actually there have been a string of tech breakthroughs in the past three years meaning that all the t-shirt-folding/truckdriving jobs are gonna be wiped out in the next 15. Like: you're right about this set of qualitatively different automation problems, but it just so happens that many of those nuts finally got cracked in the past 24 mos or so.

all future productivity gains will be offset by ppl spending more time on facebook, its defacto basic income only you have to goto a place called "a job" everyday, once there u go on facebook

werent you arguing that the majority of 'the stuff ppl in rich countries do now' is economically unnecessary garbage? i mean theres a whole host of automation that hasnt happened not because its technologically impossible but because its not economically (or sometimes in the case of high-prestige white collar work culturally) practical. i mean i think the real fear for workers shouldnt be machines getting smarter, its machines getting cheaper

― extremely online (Lamp), Thursday, March 17, 2016 11:50 AM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

can't remember when the last time we talked about this stuff was but probably before i had a white collar corporate job. i do think if the CEOs were badass enough they could make a big investment in labor-saving technology and have my whole dept run by like 5 people with PhDs instead of 100 people with BComs punching away at excel spreadsheets with their two index fingers.

reminds me of when i was a kid watching back to the future ii, there's this scene where the doc has built a rube goldberg style contraption with like conveyor belts and springboards that cooks him breakfast. i asked my dad why we don't have technology like that yet, and he said we could if we wanted to it's just stupid to build a machine to make you breakfast because it's easy to make breakfast, which seemed really deep and wise to me at the time

that was back to the future the original

ive heard this theory that many white collar workers are just larping their jobs but idk corporations love to fire ppl if they cld get away with it they prob wld

xp actually i think it was part three when they're in the wild west

Actually there have been a string of tech breakthroughs in the past three years meaning that all the t-shirt-folding/truckdriving jobs are gonna be wiped out in the next 15. Like: you're right about this set of qualitatively different automation problems, but it just so happens that many of those nuts finally got cracked in the past 24 mos or so.

― sean gramophone, Thursday, March 17, 2016 12:11 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

cool if true (link?) but i feel like you could have read an article like this every 6 months in WiReD for the past 20 years, just easy for journalists to hyberbolate about this stuff and obvs we eat it up

ive heard this theory that many white collar workers are just larping their jobs but idk corporations love to fire ppl if they cld get away with it they prob wld

― lag∞n, Thursday, March 17, 2016 12:19 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

yeah david graeber 'bullshit jobs' is the one that gets cited. i mean, the people i work with are def working their butts and creating value (well other than me who is posting about this to ilx LOL) it's more like could the company make a big investment to replace them with a combo of smarter ppl + machines/computers? personally i think yes but then you could counter with: then why didn't they, if it would increase their profits? and idk what to say to that

there are only so many smarter ppl and theyre extremely hard to identity

v true

ive heard this theory that many many white collar workers are just larping their jobs

for 5 years i have edited a weekly video series where entrepeneurs and CEOs give speeches to business students and im convinced upper management spends most of their time justifying their salaries. i'm sure they are "producing value" in the abstract or fiscal sense but yeah they mostly produce entertainment for their financial peers.

everyone wants a slice of the pie is why things aren't 100% automated

ive heard this theory that many white collar workers are just larping their jobs but idk corporations love to fire ppl if they cld get away with it they prob wld

its not actually that easy to fire lots of people! i probably have a particularly jaundiced view of this because finding inefficiencies in back office processes was my job for awhile but theres just insane amounts of unnecessary labor happening in firms. stuff like loan-processing or insurance claims or w/e - lots of ppl employed doing not very productive work that are deeply entrenched and hard to fire. like i can think of entire departments i wouldve just fired that firms kept for various politcal/cultural reasons

I think a lot of white collar jobs tend towards significant stretches of larping in between brief periods of solving actually difficult problems and creating value / avoiding disaster / minimizing disruption. the problem is from an organization's macro view of itself it's very, very difficult to figure out which is which or which are the right kind of educated people you need at what time.

a comparison could probably be made to modern air travel i.e. you got a three person crew, who knows which one or two of those are totally necessary or even if they ever will be on like 99% of flights, and then one day boom Qantas Flight 32

The tipping point for automation comes when the capital cost required to automate a process is obviously cheaper than the operational cost of paying cheap labor to do it. The movement to increase the minimum wage is part of the post-work platform because labor must become more expensive to drive increased automation.

Like there are onion-picking combines but migrant workers still pick onions because plenty of farmers can't or don't want to blow capital on it. (I bet mh has better anecdata about this sort of thing than I do.)

but yes there are also huge amounts of legacy back office processes like Lamp says, and they really are almost impossible to get rid of unless you outsource the whole thing, and even then you've probably just hired somebody else's back office because nobody is interested in blowing a bunch of capital on a massive SAP / Oracle IT consultancy smorgasbord that is relatively high-risk and low-reward

that's the other reason I don't believe in this AI gone take my jawb silliness, the investment would be huge and the reward could actually end up being very low if you still need minders to keep the system "learning" the right things and doing error correction in exigencies. Everybody's seen The Desk Set, come on

Even the deepmind guy in his interview with Verge admitted the only reason the UK NHS was engaging their help was because they were doing it for free

what silby said

agriculture and mass production of food is such a weird thing when it comes down to labor, automation, and consumption. things are definitely weighted toward min/maxing the amount of easily harvestable biomass per acre, to the point where peak production years have definitely led to the push for alternative uses. bioplastics are definitely a big thing, might be bigger if the economy ever shifts from being petroleum-based.

the automation of white collar jobs discussion is interesting i guess, but those will be the last jobs to be automated. the more pressing concerns are things that could plausibly be automated within 10 years. like, there are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US. i know this is a very anti-AI crowd but you have to have your head in the sand if you don't think self-driving vehicles are coming at some point. not to mention all the service industry people, healthcare receptionists (though i'm biased against them because some of the most enraging experiences i've ever had have involved healthcare receptionists in nyc, so fuck 'em imo), on and on. technology has always displaced jobs to some degree, and people have found other jobs, sure. but the scale of this might be kind of unprecedented. anyway there are interesting arguments on both sides but to dismiss the whole AI/basic income thing as silly is really...silly. if something so huge has evem a small chance of occurring, it's just common sense to consider the scenarios, and i'd say this has more than a small chance of occurring.

Yeah it's almost blatantly obvious that Uber's strategy is to bide its time fighting off employment regulation until it can fire all its drivers and have robots pick people up.

The movement to increase the minimum wage is part of the post-work platform because labor must become more expensive to drive increased automation.

― petulant dick master (silby), Thursday, 17 March 2016 16:36 (7 minutes ago) Permalink

i don't like this way of thinking, too accelerationist or whatever you call it. pt of minimum wage should be to give low wage workers more money imo

the unequal global distribution of large-scale farming and the eventual leveling of that field is going to be huge over the next couple decades. for better or worse, the meat consumption is on the rise in china's growing economy and they harvested as much corn as north america last year.

maize is a staple in mexico/central america and since it's a direct-to-mouth thing and not a feedstock, it's still fairly low yield. people are starting to get into hybrid maize in mexico, which is like... 1930s technology

no i said it first, give me the credit. i mean i think what really crystallized this for me was the idea that there are mostly automated factories sitting idle in california because its just cheaper for a subcontractor in china to hire a bunch of prisoners and migrant workers from the interior to make iphones. people are cheap af. theres lots of us.

but yeah its also incredibly disruptive for firms to just fire a bunch of ppl. even w/private equity its rare to just gut entire workforces, even when its probably justifiable. (uh, economically justifiable). what i think is interesting is that firms and managers realize this and a large part of the reason that hiring is slow is because these jobs are just being waited out. its easier to just not replace ppl or transfer them to other roles and slowly automate than do it all at once. in a way i think this is worse for workers bcuz the process is mostly invisible, or exists in a way that generates anxiety but not political or social pressure to change the conversation abt work.

xps Well, yeah, it's both. I mean my premise here is that work is bad, the neoliberal consensus was based on convincing everyone that work is good, or at least obligatory. We can improve material circumstances now by giving people more money for the work they're doing, we can improve material circumstances in the long run by breaking the connection between laboring and thriving.

haha i was distracted by the high-value work i do at my prestigious professional-class job so theres a bunch of xps

currently doing knowledge work

seems paradoxical how cheap labor is both an enemy to the left (chinese cheap labor stealing jobs! industries moving to the southern states where minimum wages are low! exploitation!) yet at the same time the main thing keeping the automation nightmare from happening, and also that in the US cheap laborers are not a left voting bloc (since nixon)

Automation "nightmare?" Why do you like working so much?

for 5 years i have edited a weekly video series where entrepeneurs and CEOs give speeches to business students and im convinced upper management spends most of their time justifying their salaries. i'm sure they are "producing value" in the abstract or fiscal sense but yeah they mostly produce entertainment for their financial peers.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Thursday, March 17, 2016 12:30 PM (28 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

upper management def exists in some altered reality demonstration of dominance but they represent such a small slice of the workforce and arent really representative

xxp depends on how you define cheap and which labor, but basically, yes. that's part of what's driving weirdness in the current election cycle, with trade and ppl demanding great american factory jobs

Yeah it's almost blatantly obvious that Uber's strategy is to bide its time fighting off employment regulation until it can fire all its drivers and have robots pick people up.

― petulant dick master (silby), Thursday, March 17, 2016 12:46 PM (16 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

one good thing abt driverless happening way slower than the industry wld like is hopefully uber will go out of business first

I want driverless cars now. Commuting sucks.

yeah that will be a truly beneficial technology, not any time soon tho

taking an app car will be so cheap too ~75% of yr current uber/lyft/et al fare goes to the driver (big chunk of that obvs vehicle maintenance/gas/etc tho)

i think the big hurdle with driverless cars is getting the car to recognize things that have changed in the environment, like a jaywalking pedestrian or a closed lane or a tree that fell. they seem to have got it p down in extremely controlled environments

They are driving all over the place here in the valley, with only one driverless car-caused accident so far.

they are driving with people who can take over if anything weird happens

the technology is pretty useless until it can reliably drive someone who cant drive