idiocracy + brave new world seems about right

re: OP, I trust society to not pre-emptively plan for this eventuality so I expect there will be a large amount of pain

Jason I've had a lot of these same thoughts but what gives me comfort and what I always come back to is that its very easy for us to pick out the jobs that won't exist in 25 years but its very hard to think about what new types of jobs will be created over the next 25 years that don't exist in any form today. I think history has shown that this has always played out and I don't see any reason for it to stop going forward. Yes there may be periods of pain and some people may need to switch careers or physically move to another part of the country for work but all of that is temporary, market forces will do their thing long term.

I'm glad you get to play judge of who is smart or not. Hopefully AI doesn't replace the almighty forum "judge"

If there is some sort of guaranteed income there is no need for the government to insist on a minimum wage. If there is no minimum wage fewer things will be automated because that costs money too. If the law of supply and demand determines that some jobs can still be offered at, say $5 an hour, rather than use a machine, some people will take them to put extra (but not vital) money in their pocket and keep themselves busy.

The problem is that your income is correlated to the total amount of benefit you give people rather than how hard you worked or trained or the risk you took. That sounds fine but its not really right. People who make a real lot of money because they benefit a huge number of people a little bit each (eg traders, movie stars, and athletes) as opposed to, lets say doctors, who work harder but make less, are going to hell.

I will be hosting an eight or better game there.

What if we lived in a world where there were lots of traders/athletes/etc who, even after taking a lot of risk and working very hard (even when conditioned on their genetics, innate skill set, and general luck), still did a lot of good for the world (charity, volunteering, not bequeathing their $$ to their children, etc.)...

this is gonna be an interesting dynamic given the possibility of UBI.

i may lean more toward charity vs bequeathing because i want my kids to know the pride in working hard to make your own future. but what if 25 years from now all the routes toward self made success are eliminated because of AI/robots?

I don't like UBI, socialism or democracy, but it seems likely to happen.

What's the alternative? I guess the rich could build a robot army to keep the poors in check... but short of truly ridiculous repression levels there is a point where income inequality leads to violence. If you make people pay for food and don't offer them a way to earn the money they get violent almost immediately.

wat. All I said was that there are smart and less smart forum users, not exactly a contentious claim.

Jason,

What do you think about jobs on the other end of the spectrum? What jobs will be the LAST to be replaced? I like thinking about this part of the workforce. Especially the relative change in compensation over time.

- After many debates with coworkers, I think servers at the most expensive restaurants in the world might actually see one of the highest relative increases in pay over time.

- I also think there are large groups of finance professionals (operations, execution, and some areas of research) making low to mid 6 figures that will see a huge reduction in pay as well as jobs. I think this is obvious if you work in the industry.

- Originally i thought investment research would be one of the last to go but im not so sure anymore, "The Undoing Project" made me reconsider.

Thoughts?

Saw this today and thought of this thread...

https://twitter.com/dataduce/status/897228678802755584

Comments are gold.

last jobs to get replaced are the in demand, non-perfect, "human" feel offered at a markup

waiter/chef at high end restaurant is an example. sure a robot could make a great meal, but many people when going to a high-end restaurant want a meal from "name chef brand", not robot.

you could make a broadly similar argument for simple things like ice cream parlors. robots could make a good ice cream scoop, but humans are tied to nostalgia and thus want a human to converse with and scoop the ice cream (even if the human is just some high schooler on their summer job).

psychology and social work are always going to be in demand, and perhaps a societal UBI turnaround could put these jobs more in demand.

Teachers and coaches are still going to be in demand.

Things that demand the non perfect human perspective on an experience (entertainment, travel) or a skill (tennis, painting) are gonna be the strongest.

Clayton,

I see what you're saying but I think even your examples would be replaced by bots. The "human essence", like the friendly 16 year old who scoops your sundae, is really just a collection of outputs that you are receiving and being stimulated by. I have to imagine a robot could eventually create a better product and a better atmosphere to match. It might take time and right now we're not used to this idea because we have lionized human elements -- a hug from your grandma, a smile from your best friend -- and villainized computer elements -- think HAL from 2001. But eventually, strange as it seems, there might be robots who are way cooler than your best friend and you'll prefer their company the same way you'd now prefer Louis CK's company to a homeless bum's company.

A lot of our adoration for (select) humans stems from the fact that we are programmed to do so from an eaely age; respect your elders, tell your friends you love them, fall in love with that girl, and so on. But ultimately what happens is you meet another person and you evaluate them on several criteria -- humor, intelligence, sensibility, reliability, etc -- and you hang out with the ones who meet your criteria well enough. I think we might see a day where robots are able to excel at those criteria over all humans.

There also might be some intrinsic genetic attributes to our neural networking that makes us crave contact with other humans (any neuroscientists ITT?) but I have to imagine that too could one day be sated by robots.

This sounds reasonable in theory. But in practice I don't think its too valuable. For example, $1 / hr or $5, people still break stuff, sue for workers comp, require health insurance if full time.

The comparison is insightful however. Like the minimum wage all UBI will do is create inflation. Supply and demand are relevant in that if people have more money to spend the price of the goods they consume will rise.

It will (ironically) only further marginalize the (hm, what is the right word?) proletariat as the price of subsistence goods rises while, relatively speaking, the price of luxury goods falls.

The best example is gov funding for education. Price of college has gone up as more $$ chase after the same education. The result is the marginalization of the middle class. Now both them and the poor have to borrow to pay for school.

TLDR: UBI is real, likely gonna happen and will only further / accelerate inflation (lol, and a cynic might argue that is likely why it will happen...) and the polarization of society.

Ah, the "birth lottery" and 100% estate tax. Might deserve its own thread...

Personally I have no idea how I feel about that one.

Hopefully the super AI reads Atlas Shrugged and is like, $

short term: big problems if transition goes to fast

mid term: more wealth so should be +ev

long term : Happiness, a feeling of "meaning"" are in the end just concentrations of certain chemicals inside the brain. A company like Neuralink will create a device that can track our brain waves. When this device is implemented in all humans we can observe how happy everyone is at any given time. Everything that everyone is doing will also be tracked (Anonymously on a blockchain). The data on that will serve as the ultimate input for a machine learning algo that the super AI can use to tell every individual what activities at any given time would make them most happy. Also it can track the total happiness of the entire world and optimize society for that. World will quickly get better and better.

just kidding we will all die

People don't get lazy and stop working when Basic Income becomes a thing. That's what the research I've seen shows from the countries that have it. Seems to be pretty successful.

There will be lots of new healthcare jobs and stuff when people get old, opportunities to teach in India. Lots of stuff. Jobs!

You think only paid work gives life meaning?

If AI advances to the point where it's taking most jobs away, won't it also be to the point where there is some sort of AI that's sole "job" is to make money for its user? At first it figures out how to raise capital, then it invests and deploys it in a variety of different areas in order to generate income on behalf of its user, all automated in the background requiring little more than the human user checking to see how much money his/her robot has deposited this month. And even that may be unnecessary - the user may just spend and spend and it is the task of the robot to figure out how the debts are paid (including negotiating with creditor AIs on terms).

Maybe this will be the only thing that needs to be government issued.

I wrote a long post and then hit backspace. Tilt. Cliffs:

1) I've been living on a poker nestegg for two years now, and overall it's been positive. I had to reduce my spending significantly to be able to do that, but time to write/hike/friends&family/travel (less luxuriously - but 100$ for a 4 day hike is still a great time)/rock climb is clearly >>> not doing a Michelin star restaurant every month.

2) This may seem like a point just limited to me but it's not. Most in the West/reading this forum are in the same situation. A middle class American/West European is rich beyond imagination by any sensible standard. Going to bars or non-michelin star restaurants, time and energy to exercise, culture, travelling, ... whatever a middle class westerner take from granted are all huge luxuries for most humans. Quality of life wise, the average westerner is far closer to a multimillionaire than to the rest of the world, let alone people living in the past. It's only myopia that stops people from seeing this.

3) In a sense, we are already living on a UBI. Like some dude said in the 1910s: Every salary man is like a man on a private income in the 8 hours when he's awake but not working. In western europe, work week duration has HALVED over the past century (like 68 -> 36 hours). That has been a wildly positive thing. In general, most people use most of their free time for travel/social connections/culture/self-development/... not for lethargy and addictions. Why would 36 -> 0 hours be any different?

4) Look at history. In a sense, UBI is a society where everyone can be like a Victorian gentleman. Charles Darwin was a man on a relatively modest private income. His day looked like this: read for a couple of hours, write for a couple of hours, walk for a couple of hours, hang out with the family for a couple of hours. Does that not seem like an amazing day & life to you? You can recreate that type of day easily on a very small amount of money - Eg Mr Money Moustache's family lives on 27k a year (him/wife/kid) and they seem to lead a great life of intellectual and personal growth, human connection, nature and health. [Reading tip: Rest by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang; but try to ignore how he instrumentalizes everything just to do better work, if as that is the point.]

5) This is already happening to some point. West European cities have an entire subculture of people working just enough to get like idk, 1.3k a month to pay bills when not spending to much. Then they spend the rest of their time on social connection/creating/self-development. They seem to be doing just fine.

6) "But the trucker who used to make $80k but now (maybe) gets UBI for just staying home will certainly be worse off." This is an absolutely baffling statement. Trucking takes you away from your loved ones and is very unhealthy. Why would that guy be "certainly" be worse off when he can get a UBI and stay at home doing the things in (1)? (Or whatever else floats his boat). Such a statement shows a serious lack of imagination, paid-work-bias and the sort of myopia in (2) imo. I think you could read/think a bit wider rather than just reasoning from within your view.

This does not mean there's no worry about the political effects of the richest % controlling even more of societies resources, or about whether a UBI is feasible, or that there aren't any remaining philosophical points to be figured out. But your bleak view of a UBI or 'people not working jobs'-world is imo warped and baseless.

Some more points
- it might go slower than you think, eg "- Cars drive themselves (3-5 years?)" could have been written 3 to 5 years ago ;-)
- there's no reason why 99% of the population can't work as service providers for the 1%. (or 90/10 or whatever) That is already happening now with 4$ lattes, personal trainers, personal shoppers, yoga teachers etc. Why couldn't that process continue, and why would those be worse jobs than truck drivers? why wouldn't rich people pay extra for a human touch rather than automatization. I'm not saying the 99% serving the 1% in jobs that are full of human interaction is some sort of paradise, but there's no reason to think it'd be worse than our current world (which is already pretty close to that one, with the top 1% having like xx% of the income and thus of what the market offers). The team at Cirque de Soleil is full of passionate, driven people who I'm sure love their job of entertaining the mega-rich (see point 2).

---
I'm fairly convinced the "how will those ex-truck drivers not starve" point will be taken care off, just like ex-agriculture etc. I think the main worry for the future is how people deal with all the companies that try to capture their attention in order to profit from it. How do you not spend all your time captured, when the smartest people in the world at facebook/netflix/... are working to do exactly that?

kaby,
The way intelligent motivated intellectually curious people will deal with no work is very different to the way in which the proles will deal with no work. No work will be largely wonderful for the top 15% in terms of mental health, curiosity and talent. That analysis has little in common with normal people. It's a common flaw of smart people to think others will be like them.

Virtual reality, which no one has really mentioned, is what's going to make UBI work just fine for the proles. It'll be more and more immersive, real, and emotionally intense. As long as you can plug into fun exciting worlds where you interact with others with the fidelity of real life, there's not going to be a problem. In fact I'd argue that the civilizing of society and the constant lowering of crime rates, has in part been the anesthetizing effect of television and computer games and entertainment over the last five decades. When you can be "an hero" in virtual worlds, you don't get all butthurt about life or all excited about real world isms. Our future is largely sitting on our ass, glued in a kind of weird symbiosis to a screen.

@Chips, lol at the hate bro. The best way to test someone's mind or theory is to throw them off balance and see what they cling to. Strong exagerrated opinions also create valuable detailed counterpoints.

TS,

Fair point, but I'm not so sure that's an unchangeable given, and even the passive entertainment of the masses has been getting better.

"By almost all the standards we use to measure reading’s cognitive benefits — attention, memory, following threads, and so on — the nonliterary popular culture has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everyt...s_Good_for_You


Not to mention the jobs we're talking about here. Is a truck driver going from listening to crappy radio while driving to sitting at home watching crappy TV really losing that much?

The political situation and media in the US seems to indicate otherwise .

Also a lot of people may watch shows like game of thrones for the boobs and because everyone else watches it. Seems the internet makes people most dumber as they can just sit in their echo chambers, which was harder 30 years ago.