Posted on 11/01/2014 6:58:22 AM PDT by Malone LaVeigh
Robots are poised to eliminate millions of jobs over the coming decades. We have to address the coming epidemic of "technological unemployment" if we're to avoid crippling levels of poverty and societal collapse. Here's how a guaranteed basic income will help — and why it's absolutely inevitable.
(Excerpt) Read more at io9.com ...
Cracked.com had a four part series on “the starship Icarus”, mocking Star Trek.
One episode asked why they charged more for wine than grape juice, if made from the same atoms. A funny but horrible diplomatic incident was brought up. Then another crew member said, “Because if everything from the replicator was free, I’d be the only one coming to work.”
And a basic income means most people won’t fix roads, clean toilets, string up electric lines and do the skilled but dirty labor that is essential to civilization.
This whole idea of a “basic income” for everyone is completely insane. Wouldn’t it be better to just give each person in the U.S. a trillion dollar coin? Then everyone would be RICH and not have to exist at just a subsistence level. Furthermore, everyone could buy anything they wanted and no one would ever have to work again.
The coins could be made from a base metal, so they would be cheap to make, and a few extra ones could be minted for the government itself, so taxes could be completely eliminated and yet government could still function. It’s such an elegant solution I don’t know why it hasn’t been implemented yet.
For myself, I’m going to start by buying a pony and the Broncos NFL football team. And I won’t even need pony food stamps to feed my pony because I’ll be so rich.
Yes, if the robot revolution happens as expected, that will be the problem. It will not be just another era of capitalism vs. socialism or communism, but an era where a large portion of the population will have little or no way of earning an income.
And no one need dwell in the fantasy that all the unemployed will somehow "create their own job". They won't. A few will, but the overwhelming majority won't.
This conversation has come up before and I think this mass elimination of jobs would lead to the biggest redistributionist government anyone has ever imagined.
Made for the M1. Bought some back in the 90’s, armor piercing from Argentina.
Be damned! I’ll have to look for some.
Thanks.
A single basic income will be wasted, and the poor will demand more. Additionally, they will covet what others possess and steal from others. The government may possibly then limit amounts of possessions that people can have, in effect institutionalizing socialism/communism. No good can come from such a moronic idea as universal basic income.
It is, I think, even more fundamental a shift than you say.
Every economy and society that has ever existed has functioned by controlling, in one way or another, the distribution of resources. The power of this control is based on those resources being scarce, giving power to those who control access to them.
In the world of the future, scarcity is likely to disappear or at least become much less critical, for many resources. It has already happened for information and information management, which has essentially become free. Same will likely happen for material things to an increasing extent.
So in the world of the future there is likely to be a great deal of stuff, produced with very little embedded human effort. So how is access to that stuff determined? The market and the job are by definition functions of scarcity. Who controls access when scarcity doesn’t exist? Do those who presently control wealth and power remain in control of it, and their descendants forever, simply because they happened to be in control when this shift happened?
Is there some mechanism for running such a society other than a redistributionist and therefore essentially tyrannical government? I must admit I am pessimistic that there isn’t.
I agree completely. You've expressed it very well. Most in this and a previous thread on the subject don't seem to see that with robotics and increasing automation, there will be increased efficiency and equal or greater output of goods and services with far fewer human inputs. So what are the humans to do?
And, with our trillion dollar annual expenditure on means tested poverty programs, we already have 15 - 20% of working age heads-of-household receiving most or all their income from government. Then if automation displaces a third or so of the present workforce, we'll have about half our working age adults who need a source of income, with no job.
Yep: who will own the factors of production? How will available jobs be awarded? How will all the folks with no job live? Will they be allowed to have kids? How many? Yikes. Things could get complicated.
Just sit back and collect an easy paycheck!
Very well said indeed.
This is, of course, the root issue behind the liberals’ pet issue of income inequality. The demand for the work the lower and middle income segments of the intelligence bell curve are capable of doing is dropping, while the demand for that the highest quintile is capable of is going up.
Of course by the basic law of supply and demand, the top 20% and 1% are taking more and more of total income.
Much of this issue is addressed well and prophetically in The Bell Curve, which despite what you’ve heard is not really about black racial inferiority.
It’s about exactly this issue. How can a society be structured when more and more people are just irrelevant to its function? Is there any way for (most) people without an economic function to have a decent life, even if provided (by others) with what would have been considerd 100 years ago a very decent material existence?
American and British slums and US and Canadian Indian reservations do not provide comforting insight.
But thanks for paying attention to this, which I think is far and away the biggest issue humanity faces. And absolutely nobody in the media or political world is talking about it. The earth is shifting beneat our feet and we ignore it.
idiocy
I guess everyone in the country will be forced to buy shares in all these robotic industries so they can share this wealth?
Remarkable.
What we’ll see is a rise of the skilled labor espoused by Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame, because that’s what robots still cannot due but is absolutely required for civilization, from fixing toilets to building roads to welding metal. And that’s separate from the work that humans won’t want to unload to robots.
The Great Shift Toward Automation and the Future of Employment
http://tamarawilhite.hubpages.com/hub/The-Great-Shift-and-the-Future-of-Employment
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