Will we need a basic income in the future?

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Will we need a basic income in the future?

HappyHippo: Nov 19, 2003; Do you have an Air Miles Card?

Quidam Viator posted:

That would be my follow-up question, if technology really will continue its march, as all evidence seems to indicate. We are now close enough to a near-complete devaluation of human labor that it's not just some distant science fiction; it's more in the realm of climate change, namely a thing that is inevitable without immense societal change, likely within our lifetimes. I personally believe that no existing economic framework has a valid answer to the question of what happens when labor no longer has value. Both capitalism and communism and all of their variants are founded on the idea that labor is valuable. If this thread is really meant to ask a question about the unbounded future, then we first have to come to some common ground on whether the value of labor will actually continue, or if the rest of these comments have been pure ideological masturbation about whose current worldview will survive, even though none of them will.

As far as I'm concerned, if you can't make a definitive statement defending how human labor will continue to have value, the burden of proof is on you to explain why you're still arguing as if it will. Is it simple short-sightedness, or is it denial? Or do you really have a way to explain how humans will get back into designing computer chips, running stock markets and banks, managing utilities, and of course, doing service work, having displaced their computerized competitors?

The idea that human labour will become valueless is nowhere near the realm of climate change and it's absolutely ridiculous of you to put them on the same footing. Most of the naive arguments for technological unemployment are clearly contradicted by the past few centuries of technological progression without massive unemployment. The burden is on you to explain what has changed to put us on the cusp.

# ¿ Dec 18, 2014 22:58

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 16, 2024 00:26

HappyHippo: Nov 19, 2003; Do you have an Air Miles Card?

KillHour posted:

Computers. Since the invention of the first tool, machines have been a force multiplier for labor. One person can now do the job of 'x' number of people. You still needed a person running said machine. In the past, this simply lead to each person being more productive, which in turn led to each person being able to have more stuff on the consumer side. Labor's value has been increasing for thousands of years. With computers, this is no longer the case. Full lights-out chip fabs already exist that have no employees at all. Soon, other manufacturing will follow. This is unprecedented. You will be able to run an entire manufacturing plant with 0 employees. This is fundamentally different. In a scenario like this, labor has no value, as it is completely unnecessary.

Who designs it? Who builds it? Who maintains it? Who repairs it when it breaks? Who drives the trucks to bring the raw materials in, and the products out? Who mines the raw materials? Who designs the chips? Who upgrades it when the next product is rolled out and the process changes?

Don't handwave this all away with "computers." You've basically shown that one part of the production process can be automated, which is something that's been happening for a few centuries anyway. The only difference is the scale. Computers aren't magic, and we aren't nearly as close to eliminating the labour in manufacturing as you think. And of course manufacturing has been a decreasing part of the labour force anyway. Agriculture was once the primary form of human labour, now in many countries it's something like 2%.

KillHour posted:

This isn't even the end of it. Robots don't need management. They don't need human resources or training or food services. They don't need janitors to clean the restrooms (because there are no restrooms). A business owner doesn't need internal affairs lawyers or payroll accountants or recruiters. The electricity to pay for the robots is less than the utilities to pay for lighting or heat or water. Fully automated facilities take up less space - there are no locker rooms or break rooms or parking lots. You don't need a security guard if nobody is supposed to go in the building. You don't need to pay worker's comp or health insurance or a 401k for robots. Payroll taxes, too. Companies that offer all these services go under. We will soon live in a world where anyone with capital to buy a facility and raw materials can pump out products with no human involvement whatsoever. The scalability is limited only by supply and demand constraints. Once you automate supply (not a large stretch to assume we will have automated mines and quarries), things can literally be made for the price of electricity.

Missed this part. This is the usual hyperbole I get when I ask people to back up this idea, and as usual most of it is based on a science fiction understanding of technological progress. You're discounting the cost of robotics and extrapolating far too much from your example. Advances in computing power may have been exponential over the last few decades (although there are signs that that is slowing down) but not all technology follows that curve: advances in robotics have been much less impressive. We're nowhere close to having a fully automated mine.

HappyHippo fucked around with this message at 23:41 on Dec 18, 2014

# ¿ Dec 18, 2014 23:30

HappyHippo: Nov 19, 2003; Do you have an Air Miles Card?

KillHour posted:

Software.

Printers.

Electronics.

You throw it out and have a new one put in. By robots.

Google.

More robots.

More software.

Just like with current chip fabs, you replace the entire building with each process change.

Computers aren't magic, but neither are human brains. I'm not talking about a reduction to 2%. I'm talking about elimination. There is an important difference.

Absolutely. But we have to have an end-game. Where to we need to ultimately be to have something sustainable long-term?

You should visit a modern mine some day. It's really loving cool.

http://www.catminestarsystem.com/
http://www.komatsu.com.au/AboutKomatsu/Technology/Pages/AHS.aspx
http://www.asirobots.com/mining/
http://mining.sandvik.com/sandvik/0120/Global/Internet/S003137.nsf/LUSL/SLFrameForm1A770BC5B2A975293C1257965003C974F?OpenDocument

Literally none of those things works without a human. They aren't making the point you seem to think they are. Just as a machine assists a human in force production, a computer assists with mental work. You're talking a about elimination of all human labor, but none of your examples demonstrates it. As always happens when I ask this, people respond with "but they've automated X" as if that meant anything. They've been automating things for a more than a century, you have to show that its going to be different in kind, not just degree.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 03:55

HappyHippo: Nov 19, 2003; Do you have an Air Miles Card?

VitalSigns posted:

We don't really need to posit science fiction. The last few decades have seen incredible productivity leaps with the owners and the rich sucking up not only the entire amount of gains, but managing to shove compensation even lower and gulp down, vampire-like, some of what labor had received in earlier times.

The crisis is now.

And you can prove that this is is technologically related? Because I notice the divergence corresponds to the regan/thatcher years and the erosion of unions. Also the sudden entering of women to the work force in large numbers.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 03:58

HappyHippo: Nov 19, 2003; Do you have an Air Miles Card?

Taffer posted:

I don't think you quite realize just how far automation has come in the last couple decades. There are already the beginnings of software that can design computer chips without human intervention, driverless cars are already here, fully automated shipping warehouses are already here, human-free manufacturing has been here for a while and is getting more robust by the day.

Oh, tell me more about this software that makes a chip without human intervention. Do you just tell it you want an new x86 and it spits one out? Or do you have to pay people to write thousands of lines of vhdl /verilog and then the software lays it out? Oh wait it's the second one.

quote:

There is no handwaving going on here. These technologies already exist and are starting to be implemented on a larger scale. There is no "if" about driverless cars or automated manufacturing or the myriad other automation technologies that will replace human labor, just a "when", and that "when" is knocking down the door.

You seem to fixate on manufacturing, saying "of course" it will go down, but it'll be fine because agriculture did too and people still have jobs. But it's not just manufacturing. It's everything. All forms of transportation are on the verge of being turned robotic, clerical work, accounting, legal work, medical work, even engineering work - are in the process of being replaced by computers right now. And I'm not just talking about productivity increases like Autocad or Excel making people work faster. I'm talking about replacement. As in, people not required.

You could take this further and say that we'll still need software developers and engineers to design these systems - and you'd be absolutely right, we will need those people (though to an extent they too will be replaced by their own systems. Oh the irony), but the automation they create will replace more people than are required to design it, because this is a symptom of capitalism and its goal is to increase efficiency, so if it didn't save money it wouldn't be done.

There's no irony because engineers engineering themselves out of a job isn't even on the horizon.

quote:

Computers aren't magic, but this is nothing like the industrial revolution, which brought machines to increase the productivity of labor. This isn't just replacing people doing physical labor, it's replacing people required to do thinking too.

If you would like to see an easily digestible overview of how this all is happening and how it is nothing like the slow but steady plodding of machine automation pre-computer, check this video. (It's likely you've seen it, it's a popular video. But it explains the realities of the situation far better than I do)

Again, no argument as to why things are suddenly different in kind, as opposed to degree. Showing me that jobs X Y and Z have been replaced or automated says nothing, they've been doing that for a century or two. It just frees up labor for other work. What you need to show is that we're on the cusp of something that is different in kind, not degree.

(Sorry for multiple replies in a row, lm phone posting)

# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 04:22

HappyHippo: Nov 19, 2003; Do you have an Air Miles Card?

Vira posted:

So automation reduced the workforce drastically for manual labor and there was a new focus on mental labor. And now we are seeing the dawn of the automation on mental labor. Where do you think a majority of the work force turn as the complexity of the automation grows?

Are you arguing that this is not happening or will never happen? Can you explain how more work may open up when you only need a fraction of the workforce to run everything?

The problem with the argument is that "everything" is a moving target. "Everything" that was being done in 1900 takes only a fraction of the workforce today. But now we have a whole new set of poo poo that the remainder do. Designing a website wasn't even a job until recently. Automating a task, mental or physical, lets people focus on higher level tasks.

BTW, automating mental labour isn't new. Its been happening since about the 40s.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 05:45

HappyHippo: Nov 19, 2003; Do you have an Air Miles Card?

KillHour posted:

The argument to this is that new jobs will be created to replace the lost jobs, just as they always have. The missing piece to this is that when we create a general purpose machine that can replace humans (not just a specialized one like a printing press, or whatever), there will be nowhere for a human to go that said general purpose machine cannot replace them.

Previously, it was a cycle of "Replace specific manual job with machine, that is only good at said job, humans adapt." It's going to be "Replace all manual jobs with flexible machine." Where do humans go after that?

The argument now has to be "This won't happen." To that, I reply with this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diaZFIUBMBQ

Sorry I can't watch this video right now (still on my phone). At least you get the idea that its not about automation of this or that, it's about some sort of general purpose automator that automates all takes for now and forever. Thats the only thing that could fulfill the argument that its being attempted and I'm not seeing that on the horizon at all. I'm not speculating about 100 years from now, that's a fool's errand. But in terms of the challenges for this generation its not something that we're facing. Yet I see it brought up all the time as though its just around the corner.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 05:54

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 16, 2024 00:26

HappyHippo: Nov 19, 2003; Do you have an Air Miles Card?

VitalSigns posted:

Oh it's not. What I mean is that the necessity of redistribution isn't some far-off theoretical like what happens if everything is automated and the ultrarich owners of the robots live in luxury while the excess labor starves.

The owners of resources and capital are sucking up a larger and larger share of the wealth produced by our modern-day society Today. Right now. Six percent of us today can't find a job and are surplus labor with all of the misery that implies. But instead of taking up the slack by robots, our society just overworks everyone else. We don't need basic income in the future, we need it now and have needed for a long time (as was recognized when we partially implemented it in a little plan called Social Security)

Just to be very clear, I'm not trying to touch on the topics of basic income or any other issue. I think those are fine ideas to discuss. I'm just annoyed by the assumption that all labour is about to be made obsolete by machines. I think its a total distraction that keeps being brought up in topics like these.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 05:57

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Will we need a basic income in the future?