Posted on 05/20/2015 8:27:35 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Scott Santens has been thinking a lot about fish lately. Specifically, he’s been reflecting on the aphorism, “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life.” What Santens wants to know is this: “If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?”
Santens is 37 years old, and he’s a leader in the basic income movement—a worldwide network of thousands of advocates (26,000 on Reddit alone) who believe that governments should provide every citizen with a monthly stipend big enough to cover life’s basic necessities. The idea of a basic income has been around for decades, and it once drew support from leaders as different as Martin Luther King Jr. and Richard Nixon. But rather than waiting for governments to act, Santens has started crowdfunding his own basic income of $1,000 per month. He’s nearly halfway to his his goal.
Santens, for his part, believes that job growth is no longer keeping pace with automation, and he sees a government-provided income as a viable remedy. “It’s not just a matter of needing basic income in the future; we need it now,” says Santens, who lives in New Orleans. “People don’t see it, but we are already seeing the effects all around us, in the jobs and pay we take, the hours we accept, the extremes inequality is reaching, and in the loss of consumer spending power.”(continued)
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I teach history and economics to young people. They have little to no experience in the job market, but every single one so far understands why welfare hurts people. They understand it because they are human, and every one of us has a lazy streak.
The problem with a guaranteed income is the ability of that income to utterly destroy the will to work any harder than minimally necessary.
The ideas that no one should starve or that everyone should have a nice home are worthy. The details - dealing with human frailties - are huge and cannot be discounted.
I don’t know the answers - only that giving away OPM (Other People’s Money) to those who did not earn it - probably is not going to work.
Scott Santens has been thinking a lot about fish lately. Specifically, he’s been reflecting on the aphorism, “If you give a man a fish, he eats for a day. If you teach a man to fish, he eats for life.” What Santens wants to know is this: “If you build a robot to fish, do all men starve, or do all men eat?”
Unlike most of us here at Free Republic I think this guy ‘may’ have a point.
Automation both in straight computers that take over repeatable office level tasks from humans. I.E clerking as in one computer now does the job of hundreds of clerks in keeping up the accounting ‘books’, figuring out actuarial tables, etc.
As for myself I actually helped in such an effort. When I started to work at my last job there were over sixty union people working three shifts a day to collect weather data. Today there are four and ten times the data is collected and processed in seconds where it used to take hours.
So this guy is wondering how do we as a nation take care of all of the people whose work has been automated out of existence. (I’m going to avoid the jobs sent out of the country for the time being.)
Logically there are several methods to do this. In no particular order: ‘F’ them... no benefits ya slackers, go find a job, go be a ditch digger. Okay... Where we once used hundreds of ditch diggers to dig a ditch we can use one guy on a ‘Ditch Witch’ to do that job.
How about a railroad line? Ten guys with a track laying machine replaces the hundreds if not thousands that did that. More automation in other words, less people more machines and the efficiency goes up. We all know of hundreds of such examples.
Where we as a society once needed thousands if not millions of human workers to build/create our cities and infrastructure now need only a fraction of those numbers and the machines that replaced the back breaking labor of the rest.
So what happens when we have too many humans and not enough work to keep them busy? We have what we see today... a transition from the need for more workers to the need to keep the ‘idle’ occupied and fed.
It’s a tough thing here people... If we as a society aren’t careful we will see war breaking out as population depleter, or plagues... or something else. We use welfare and entertainment of various sorts to keep our unemployed population in check. But that’s at the expense of the employed population. So what we get are even more societal pressures.
As for me I don’t have any answers. I just see that it’s all going to come crashing down and at some point in the future society will equalize again. That process though is going to be excruciatingly painful.
On the one hand, the aspects of the benefits of automation and the amount of work it can save is true.
But perhaps the one flaw in automation as an extension into wholesale replacement of the idea of work, its value, the compensation needed, etc., is that automation does not fully sustain itself. If and until automation can produce, operate, maintain and upgrade itself without human help, then it cannot become a wholesale replacement.
Even when the level of automation approaches those capabilities, who is going to take the time to become educated, willing to work and exist outside the utopia of a guaranteed living existence offered by it (automation). I’d think the curve on this would reach a peak and then fall back down to disrepair.
Eloi, prepare to be meat for Morlocks.
Surplus population.
I think that there are always people who want more out of life than the lowest common denominator. Those who build and maintain the robots will do so in order to make the big bucks and buy a mansion far away from the non-producers.
I would almost agree with another poster that those on the dole should be sterilized, but considering the spread of porn and the rise of sexbots, the non-producers will likely unbreed themselves out of existence.
The basic income movement started before FDR. It was widely popular and FDR struck back with Social Security as a milder compromise. Had he not done that he might have faced an expensive primary. Social Security stopped way short of what the more extreme thinkers wanted, but over the decades Congress has expanded Social Security to encompass more and more of what it was originally intended to forestall.
the basic income movement -- a worldwide network of thousands of advocates (26,000 on Reddit alone) who believe that governments should provide every citizen with a monthly stipend big enough to cover life's basic necessities.To quote McClintock -- "The government never *gave* anyone anything!"
I have read elsewhere that as automation increases a tax should be imposed on the robots that are displacing human workers since the fewer humans who remain employed will bear an increasing tax burden for the rest of their fellows.
A Robot Tax is pretty freaky sounding but the direction we’re headed with more automation seems like an idea worth exploring.
> I think this guy is just looking to become a future guru of wealth redistribution, and as such get more redistributed to him (with the blessings of the masses, of course).
Our culture is so screwed up right nowv because of one man who dropped avphooe and change bomb 6 1/2 years ago. The fallout has been hell on earth. If the man isn’t the AntiChrist he’d his best friend.
Our culture is so screwed up right nowv because of one man who dropped a hope and change bomb 6 1/2 years ago. The fallout has been hell on earth. If the man isn’t the AntiChrist he’d his best friend.
Those Morlocks aren’t around anymore. They are far different beings in The Time Ships (excellent read BTW).
You beat me to it...
“To rebut your point, Communism DOES work. It works every day........and the system WORKS... very well in most cases. Communism does work... at the FAMILY level.”
Excellent point Teach! And notice how those who want to implement communism know that it takes breaking up the system in the family and transferring it to the government where Dad is no longer relevant. The destruction of the family unit is almost complete in America. Hillary “It takes a village.” Clinton may be our next President.
This argument is going to come up more and more with automation and expansion of trade.
Democrats appeal to those who don't work to get their votes, Obama campaign turned out millions of losers wanting more handouts to vote in 2012. Many of the GOP candidates are now talking about 'income inequality' now.
Obama recently said that voting should be mandatory similar to Obamacare.
Of course voting has been mandatory in many dictatorships where the vote is rigged and a joke,.
Do these people's minds stop working or what? Where do they think the money government gives out comes from? Someone has to work in order for the government to steal the money to give to those who are not working. Who is going to load the trucks, the pallets, the shelves, etc.? Are these thousands of people that mentally stunted?
I didn’t think about that. I was thinking who’s going to program the robots? Then, and we know this will happen, some other idiotic leftist will want to give robots “rights,” join a union, strike, and so on.
A very pleasant voiced robot, perhaps in the form of an attractive young woman.
Why do you ask?
Unless civilization collapses first, this will become a serious issue, probably within the lifetimes of younger FReepers. We are rapidly approaching the point where almost all jobs that can be reliably and enjoyably done by persons of average intelligence and below will be able to be done more cheaply by robots and computers. The use of technology will also drastically cut the need for human beings to do jobs that require significant intelligence -- do we really need more than one person to give lectures on general relativity when a video connection could let everyone get the lectures of the most articulate among brilliant physicists? LegalZoom has already cut down the number of man hours needed from lawyers to do routine things like simple wills or incorporation papers. AI to make valid trust documents, contracts for most matters and the like isn't really that hard to do.
We on the right had better figure out how to manage the transition to a society in which far less human labor, both physical and intellectual, is needed to sustain a developed economy than there are people to provide it, and which will somehow sustain the traditional virtues and personal responsibility. The left and the professional managerial class have a way of managing the transition, and the result will look like the worst features of 1984, Brave New World and The Hunger Games all rolled into one.
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