When Technology Eliminates Jobs, We'll Want a Basic Income

Inverse ^ | July 5, 2016 | Nickolaus Hines

[2ndDivisionVet]

Robin Chase and Martin Ford explain why at a White House roundtable.

Automation is going to make universal basic income a necessity sooner rather than later, a White House panel discussed today.

Technology entrepreneur and Zipcar founder Robin Chase and author Martin Ford (Rise of the Robots) today during a Facebook Live discussion with White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough.

“We need to start thinking about universal basic income,” Chase said, referring to the concept of a base-level of income each person would get just for being alive. “If people had that platform, that basic minimum, we could be tapping this much larger number of people to do things that can’t be automated,” like relational and social problems on the community level....

[nopardons]

If nobody works, where does the money come from, for the universal income ?

[Paladin2]

The population must necessarily decrease....

[Steely Tom]

It’s obvious.

Robots will be licensed and taxed by the government.

A little bit of the taxes thus collected will be used to pay the unemployed some sort of a subsistence wage.

Of course, about two-thirds of the money collected will go to line the pockets of various politicians.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

If nobody works, where does the money come from, for the universal income?

The rich. The rich have piles of money lying around doing nothing. If they weren't so selfish we could ALL be rich!

[Dilbert San Diego]

If nobody works, where does the money come from, for the universal income ?

---

Maybe they haven’t thought this all the way through yet???

[plain talk]

If nobody works, where does the money come from, for the universal income ?

I don't think the premise is that nobody works. I could be wrong but I think they are talking about all the people with low level skills displaced by automation. So I suspect they would expect all those that do have jobs to pay for the minimum income for those without jobs due to automation.

[marron]

That’s a good excuse.

Actually, you only need to provide a basic income to everyone if you outlaw entrepreneurship.

People thinking up ways to serve people is how a normal economy works, and people will always think up inventive ways to build, create, invent, and serve one another.

Each level of technology only makes the next level possible. It frees people to think of things that yesterday they could not have thought of. There is no level of technology that we reach where people, if they are not soul-dead, do not use it to invent the next level. A centralized economy has surplus people you don’t need; but a decentralized entrepreneurial economy makes room for anyone who is creative and willing to get off the couch.

[impimp]

This is garbage. People fretted when the percentage of people involved in agriculture/food production dropped from 90% to 2%. This helped to create mass production assembly lines. Mass production assembly lines stimulated the service economy. Efficiencies in service helped lead to the Information Age. NO BASIC INCOME NEEDED BEFORE SO NONE NEEDED NOW.

[mrsmith]

Yes, they want the savings to be taken by the government and spent on welfare INSTEAD of being invested in new industries.
Just the opposite of what happened in the switch from agriculture to manufacturing.

Of course there is a benefit from transitional welfare payments, but they want a permanent welfare class instead of new jobs.

[Mad Dawgg]

Automation/Robots are going to change things drastically in the next two decades.

I am not sure a basic income will work but I am fairly sure what we call minimum wage jobs now will all but disappear due to automation. That will put a lot of people out of work permanently. Either we figure out how to see to their needs like food and housing etc. or there is going to be blood in the streets.

[eyeamok]

Good, send these 2 clowns to Venezuela for a year so they can tell us how it works.

[Kickass Conservative]

Let me guess, both of them used to work at the Buggy Whip Factory, right?

[usconservative]

If nobody works, where does the money come from, for the universal income ?

That's a silly question. We have this magical device that's called a PRINTING PRESS.

It prints this thing called MONEY.

Need more money? We just fire up the ol' printing press and print it right up!

We've been doing that for some $20,000,000,000,000 and counting and so far it's been working great!!

[bigbob]

Details, details!

Gotta be $15 an hour too, can’t expect people to stay alive for less than a burger-flipper gets

[Elderberry]

If nobody works, where does the money come from, for the universal income ?

[Mad Dawgg]

"Efficiencies in service helped lead to the Information Age."

But when the robots can fix the robots where does one get a job?

We are fast approaching a time where anything a human can do manually a robot will be able to do better including fixing broken robots.

This situation is no where near the same as what happened before in the industrial age etc.

[rey]

Thank you. A sane mind at last.

No one can predict the future. No one knows what occupations will arise. No one could have predicted the tech jobs in the 80s or earlier.

I just finished reading about Qantas Flight 32; the flight to land with more mechanical defects than any plane in history. No way could the computers have save that one, just some very brave and very focused individuals. Three will always be a place for humans.

[nopardons]

Of course; that goes without saying.

[nopardons]

LOL....only if they are GOPers.