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So recycle and use renewable energy. If these cost more, it just means that it takes more workers and labor to supply these goods. This is just a repeat of the same theme, freeing up labor in one sector allows more/better products to be produced in another. In this case, it’s better products in the sense than they are less damaging to the environment.
This has been discussed before. People who talk about the mythical jobs in the future invariably use the example of replacing saddle making jobs with jobs in the automobile industry over 100 years ago.
They fail to recognize that all of the new jobs are going to robots and not people. And they refuse to acknowledge that jobs for young people have dried up. Youth unemployment is higher than great depression levels - and that is after taking account that large numbers of the unemployment figures are buried in colleges and trade schools where people can pay up to $100,000 or more to get a degree.
Unemployment (US) in the 16-19 year old age group rose to record highs in the 2008 recession but then steadily declined and by 2019 were are 50 year lows. Post coved they are at record highs again. Volatility seems to be more of an issue than any trend towards youth employment drying up, and in any case maybe kids in that age group are better served spending those hours working on their education.
It is a matter of how much their labor is worth. If they needed to paid a large amount then the job would be done by their employers leaving the unskilled workers unemployed. But give them a small wage + the UBI for a part time job and they will be able to live.
Not true in the vast majority of cases. Jobs with persistently low wages are far more likely to be a result of Oligopsony in the labor market than they are to be a consequence of the job itself having so little value it simply goes away.
Depending on the job in question it may go somewhere else, but it isn't a bad thing to export your low wage (and therefor low productivity) jobs. It reduces the cost of your goods and services while freeing up labor for higher wage higher productivity jobs to be performed locally.
Even if the jobs has so little value that it can disappear entirely, this isn't really a bad thing either because it pushes people on to higher paying more productive jobs.
This has been discussed before. People who talk about the mythical jobs in the future invariably use the example of replacing saddle making jobs with jobs in the automobile industry over 100 years ago.
They fail to recognize that all of the new jobs are going to robots and not people. And they refuse to acknowledge that jobs for young people have dried up. Youth unemployment is higher than great depression levels - and that is after taking account that large numbers of the unemployment figures are buried in colleges and trade schools where people can pay up to $100,000 or more to get a degree.
Your position is based on a pretty huge assumption of the future, and not one that is representative of any technology that we have, technology that we are working on, or even any technology that are likely to be created in the future.
Not that you are absolutely wrong, but the burden of proof for that statement is very high given that there is not really evidence for it so far. I think what you fail to realize is that AI, and the robotics that are based off of it is not created by some magic ball. No matter how advanced it is, there are still limitations because it is bound by a set of operating principles that limit its cognitive capability, especially as it relates to rational thought.
To explain what I mean, I will have to get a little deep.
As automation takes more menial task jobs, it increases efficiency of our system, and creates more opportunities to better use human critical thinking skills rather than menial labor. Even when robots take the jobs of law clerks, cashiers, and radiology techs, it increases efficiency and may times adds new tools that we were not able to use before. Often creating new jobs and roles that more efficiently use our labor.
Take an example of one of the biggest artificial intelligence advances of the 20th century that had enormous implications on our employment, the electronic calculator. The calculator mimicked a human intelligence feature in a way that no human could ever match in speed or complexity. Yet instead of eliminating whole sets of jobs, it created massive new sectors that were not fathomable before.
History has always followed the trend of increased employment types with new technology eras, and there has never been any indication that this trend will cease to exist.
In the future, there is the potential for employment opportunities to be far higher than there ever would be the supply to meet.
One of the potential jobs in the future will be mining new designs and discovering efficiencies in virtual representative worlds. Basically a massive generative design model. Generative design is the process of taking the basic dimensions of a part, and putting it through thousands of iterative designs to obtain a part with ideal strength to weight ratios, in ways that no human could ever design. The end results is something that looks organic, often similar in aspects to things that you would find in nature. In other words, it looks like a part that has been through thousands of processes of evolutionary natural selection. In many ways, it has.
For instance in the Autodesk Generative design program, users can include target weight, model limits, connection points, key features such as strength and cost to generate 'ideal' models. While there is a long way to go, these have been used in race car designs, drone designs, and other applications where optimal efficiency is critical.
A human is required to guide these designs, as this still operates under the "search and find" principle of AI today.
As far as AI development goes, the only two things holding us back from being able to deploy this on an AGI scale is processing power, and the ability to model a representative world for comparative analysis.
As smart as Watson, Tensor Flow, Amazon Lex, and many of the other top AI programs are, they are still inherently 'search and find' programs. They cannot 'understand' the answers they provide, because they have no way to contextualize them. There are many well funded and intelligent researchers working on addressing this problem, largely through various schools of Machine Learning thought. Many of these projects include a combination of many different machine learning programs to search, create, and check their output using a combination of different techniques.
In my mind, the best way to create the representative world that would bridge to an AGI would be a Representative Systems Network. This would require a network of machine learning programs to define, translate, and validate systems occurring in our environment. In many ways this mimics our own way of rational analysis while translating it into a process that a machine program can use to analyze, compare, and eventually 'understand' our world.
However it is created, a representative world is an extremely likely forthcoming technology as a key requirement of an AGI.
With a large scale representative world, you would be able to apply this principle to every piece of consumer electronics, building design, power generation, manufacturing, scientific advancement, AI development, more ideal economic and government systems, and pretty much everything else in our life. Nearly every single artificial good and service would be in a constant state of efficiency analysis and improvement. Even the social structures that guide our lives and contribute to most of our actions.
For example, instead of a research team working on a new antenna design for a year currently, you instead would have the virtual equivalent of billions of scientists and designers working on the design in a simulated million years in what in reality would be days, or even hours.
Humans would be needed to 'mine' these worlds for new advances because of our unique ability for rational analysis and imagination. There would be a greater need for this than there would be numbers of humans in the universe. There of course would still be customer service agents, artists, chefs, designers, and many other roles. I am sure that also includes many roles that I could not Fathom in our current environment. The difference from today is that our ability to achieve these roles would be enhanced by the greater amount of tools provided for us.
UBI in this type of future would be a given, the reduced efficiency and inherent wasteful overhead of the complex web of our current systems would never be acceptable. Not when efficiency basically becomes the new religion.
The question becomes at what point does UBI become more efficient? It might be more efficient now. Right now we run people through a whole system of support from Wellfare, to food stamps, to tax relief, to school support. All of these systems have unnecessary overhead and inefficiencies. Plus 80% of people are arrested for misdemeanor crimes. A good portion of those from crimes of poverty. There are costs from our judical system, police services, jail services, and rehabilitation. However the largest cost is the opportunity cost from not having what otherwise would be a much more productive member of society.
Certainly many of the wasteful and unnecessary wars that we have engaged in could have gone towards systems like UBI to increase the overall productivity of our National workforce.
UBI is certainly not going to be instituted any time soon, but it will be a given in the future.
History has always followed the trend of increased employment types with new technology eras, and there has never been any indication that this trend will cease to exist.
You are too steeped in the past to notice that conditions have changed.
It is true that new technology will create new jobs but there is no reason to believe that they will make a dent in the unemployment or underemployment numbers. It is mostly high level jobs that will be created for a few and not large numbers of menial jobs that are being replaced by machines.
It's hard to imagine why any venture with enough capital would rent your robot at wages high enough to support your life of leisure when they could just buy their own robots and cut you out of the middle.
A truly robotized workplace would mean the end of the labor economy as we know it. Capital would no longer have any need of labor. I can't see how our current system could continue to exist under such a condition, a radical shift would be inevitable.
If we're going to have a universal basic income to sustain a largely idle workforce, then I want universal public works to go with it. People should not get paid to be idle. I'm sure there's plenty of crowd-sourcing credits to be earned on all kinds of projects. I'm sure that even if we expanded business automation by an order of magnitude, there'd still be useful tasks that could be assigned to a legion of citizens working part-time.
Clean up graffiti and trash. Tend to national parks and monuments. Tutor children. Care for the infirm. Produce art. Hell, build a pyramid or two.
Anyway, I can't shake the impression that the whole idea is somehow circular. Nobody is working, so nobody is getting paid. So nobody has any money to buy anything. Then where is the money for the UBI coming from? Taxes? Okay, but what revenue is being taxed, if nobody has any money and nobody is buying anything?
Seems like it would end up being some weirdly elaborate totalitarian barter system. The government orders you to put a robot to work providing goods and services to me, free of charge. And then... orders me to put a robot to work providing goods and services to the people who maintain your robot? Nobody gets paid anything, we all just have to provide stuff for each other somehow.
Your position is based on a pretty huge assumption of the future, and not one that is representative of any technology that we have, technology that we are working on, or even any technology that are likely to be created in the future.
Not that you are absolutely wrong, but the burden of proof for that statement is very high given that there is not really evidence for it so far.
History has always followed the trend of increased employment types with new technology eras, and there has never been any indication that this trend will cease to exist.
You are too steeped in the past to notice that conditions have changed.
It is true that new technology will create new jobs but there is no reason to believe that they will make a dent in the unemployment or underemployment numbers. It is mostly high level jobs that will be created for a few and not large numbers of menial jobs that are being replaced by machines.
Again, you are making a claim that has never been seen in history, and currently has no evidence that it will happen in the future.
I am not saying that you are automatically wrong in that claim, it just requires a higher burden of proof or reasoning for most people to accept as valid.
The Internet is not magic. There's actually a lot of labor involved in delivering digital content. The work doesn't end when the editor presses the "upload" button in their browser window.
If we're going to have a universal basic income to sustain a largely idle workforce, then I want universal public works to go with it. People should not get paid to be idle. I'm sure there's plenty of crowd-sourcing credits to be earned on all kinds of projects. I'm sure that even if we expanded business automation by an order of magnitude, there'd still be useful tasks that could be assigned to a legion of citizens working part-time.
Clean up graffiti and trash. Tend to national parks and monuments. Tutor children. Care for the infirm. Produce art. Hell, build a pyramid or two.
Anyway, I can't shake the impression that the whole idea is somehow circular. Nobody is working, so nobody is getting paid. So nobody has any money to buy anything. Then where is the money for the UBI coming from? Taxes? Okay, but what revenue is being taxed, if nobody has any money and nobody is buying anything?
Seems like it would end up being some weirdly elaborate totalitarian barter system. The government orders you to put a robot to work providing goods and services to me, free of charge. And then... orders me to put a robot to work providing goods and services to the people who maintain your robot? Nobody gets paid anything, we all just have to provide stuff for each other somehow.
I think the idea is that UBI is low enough that life sucks, but you won't die.
If you want nicer stuff, you gotta work. For people who want to go on dates, have a good phone/car, and get by you are going to have to work. I think there would a huge vast majority of people that would want to 'live the American Dream,' than those just wanting to be able to survive.
I really like the idea of tying a higher level of UBI to public service, but in general one of the major strengths of UBI is the reduced overhead and streamlined costs from combining so many wasteful separate systems into one. The more stipulations and tiers you make, the more costly the administrative costs of running the program become.
If we're going to have a universal basic income to sustain a largely idle workforce, then I want universal public works to go with it. People should not get paid to be idle. I'm sure there's plenty of crowd-sourcing credits to be earned on all kinds of projects. I'm sure that even if we expanded business automation by an order of magnitude, there'd still be useful tasks that could be assigned to a legion of citizens working part-time.
Clean up graffiti and trash. Tend to national parks and monuments. Tutor children. Care for the infirm. Produce art. Hell, build a pyramid or two.
The Internet is not magic. There's actually a lot of labor involved in delivering digital content. The work doesn't end when the editor presses the "upload" button in their browser window.
The Internet is not magic. There's actually a lot of labor involved in delivering digital content. The work doesn't end when the editor presses the "upload" button in their browser window.
Broad unease about losing jobs to machines could dissipate as people focus on the benefits of minimizing close human contact...
“Pre-pandemic, people might have thought we were automating too much,” said Richard Pak, a professor at Clemson University who researches the psychological factors around automation. “This event is going to push people to think what more should be automated.”
Mark Muro, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies labor markets, said that with companies hurting for cash, the pressure to replace humans with machines becomes even more intense.
“People become more expensive as companies’ revenues decline,” he said.
A new wave of automation could also mean that when companies start hiring again, they do so in smaller numbers.
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