Basic income

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

Well, even the limited stuff like what Tesla has already (drives itself on the freeway) is pretty sweet. I just don't want to spend two hours every day with my foot hovering over the pedals in stop-and-go traffic.

yeah thats good for sure but the holy grail is automated taxi service

and all the lil problems like heavy rain or figuring out where to park to let someone out or dealing with a temporary stop light are very difficult to solve, i suspect that the current map based approach just will never work

clothes folding now takes robots only 5-10 minutes!
http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/laundry-folding-robot-folds-laundry-thank-you-japan-1.3263516

xp yup

i want the laundry bot

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

By the time it's perfected we'll all be heads in jars, Futurama style.

we will be uploaded to facebook

I just don't want to spend two hours every day with my foot hovering over the pedals in stop-and-go traffic.

Move closer to work.

Google just put BD up for sale fwiw

walk up a flight of stairs

― flopson, Thursday, 17 March 2016 16:03 (20 minutes ago) Permalink

i was under the impression that asimo was able to ascend and descend a full flight of stairs

I like this piece at LGM that just went up

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/03/capital-mobility-and-trumpism

And while people may support dreamy ideas like Universal Basic Income or more politically possible ideas that would help around the margins like an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit, none of these things are happening now while all the manufacturing jobs are in fact disappearing. And whether that is because of capital mobility or it is because automation, we have zero concrete plans on what to do with millions of working class people. At best, we might give slight subsidies to retraining programs for careers that pay less and may not have a future anyway. At worst, we start drug testing for people who get on public assistance or slash those programs to nothing anyway.

...When you give working Americans no good options, we might think they would turn to socialism. And a few have, as the Sanders campaigns demonstrates. But without widespread leftist organizing in working-class communities, which in working-class white communities largely does not exist, the appeal of racial and class prejudice added to the appeal of seeing someone tell off the forces that have doomed them to stagnation and poverty, that’s very powerful. That’s the Trump voter.

UBI isn't going to work if there are no dignified jobs for people to do even if they don't "need" to do them. And we're never going to get anything close to a basic income if we just destroy the middle class and let the resentment fester.

i don't understand how restricted capital mobility is going to bring good middle class jobs back to the white working class

also it's important to remember that Trump will lose

the point I took from it is that even if we had any options to legislate UBI into existence it doesn't solve for having literally nothing to do all day

im hella in favor of guaranteed public jobs programs

ppl can still have jobs if they want with basic income, or just live in a yurt <<< smart ppl

but what abt when ppl want a sick job, having copious yurt experience is not going to look good meanwhile "i buried and dug up gold for the us govt" is gonna be like wow u have some great experience with the shiny metal gold u r hired

the yurt economy is gonna be huge

more like the hurt economy is gonna be yuge because ppl wont have meaningful work opportunities

the butthurt belt