Only? Of course not. But I think in today's society status is achieved and conveyed in large part through your career, thus a loss of career to many people necessarily means a loss of status.

also this.

agree, and if anything i'm more cynical. i don't think VR is gonna save the appalachians or the rust belt. UBI is just gonna help pay for the opioids.

I don't disagree, but I think the timeframe on this happening is quite far out, far enough (50 years?) that I don't consider it relevant in the scope of societal transfer into UBI measured against AI/technology (25 years). Both are in their infancy in the long run, but I'm focused on the general disarray that comes from technology superceding jobs. A robot disguised as an ice cream man will take a couple more decades to trick me, so I think those jobs are still gonna be safe for a while before robots replace almost everything.

There's a reason why I'd like to see a one time 15k payout from the government to get sterilized. Middle class+ people aren't going to take the deal unless they weren't going to have kids anyway... But poors will be doing it left and right. We have to do something about the relatively rapid rate of reproduction in the bottom quarter vs the top quarter.

I know WAY too many people who can't take care of themselves but have 1-3 kids. I suspect the ROI to the government on that 15k would be 300%+.

Hopefully UBI means we do away with every form of welfare that rewards having children.

Fortunately, i don't need to be confident about the next 25 years, since i plan to retire in 10, but i would say that my job (professor) is one of the safest out there as the moment. I remember when the first online schools starting popping up in the early internet days. There was calls of doom and gloom for the entire brick and mortar university industry. Predictions were made that we'd all be out of a job in 10 years.

Predictions didn't work out that way at all. If anything, we are hiring more rapidly now that in the entire time i've been doing this. Many of us B&M profs are also teaching online for side pay. It has been very lucrative for us. My overall salary has doubled in the last 5 years alone.

For some reason, students don't always go to college for the learning. They often go for the experiences that happen outside of the classroom. We have good memories of college that usually have nothing to do with what we did in classrooms. When i send my son to college, i'll explain to him that those experiences are 90% of why he is there.

Many students do the online thing because they cannot do the B&M route. They are either military, too far from a campus, cannot afford the room and board, don't like people, etc. They wouldn't go to our school anyway, so we don't miss them.

I figure that there are other careers out there as well that will survive because of the "human factor".

Wow, that got longer than i planned.

Finally something practical, that's not hot air. Now double that for single moms who already have one child.

Triple it for certain neighborhoods. Now you have to find some marketing meme like UBI and promote it bc in this form for sure it can't be sold to the public. This here will at least have a real impact.

So... A Brave New World huh?

Only BFI could go from robots replacing jobs to serious discussion of ethical genocide of the poors in less than a page.

You can't target it like that. A significant amount of the social benefit is gone when they already have one kid, so the payout needs to be at its highest when they are childless. You can't target by neighborhood because inevitably you'll hit some minority neighborhoods super hard and look like (and probably actually be) a racist. Can't sell that, and honestly wouldn't really want to.


I'm even somewhat ok with the reverse where if you have a child and don't pay a 10k tax we sterilize you and take the kid into state custody. It's long past time to stop pretending that society doesn't have a stake in reproductive decisions. We're spending astronomical amounts of money on poor children with very bad returns generally.

Children who grow up in poverty generally grow up to be poor people. I grew up poor and this is a list of things I had no idea how to do at 18:

1. Brush my teeth. Seriously it still requires conscious effort to remember to brush my teeth. My wife was raised similarly and between us we've managed to spend 5 figures on dentistry over the last couple of years.

2. Clean up after myself. I'm a lot better about it now, but I grew up in squalor (we had roaches because of the rotting food on the floor, nothing had been cleaned ever, there was caked grime on nearly everything) and honestly had no idea why being clean was necessarily better than being dirty. To this day my tolerance level for slobbery is way too high.

3. Be on time. I was late to literally everything growing up. Now I'm compulsively on time and being late is incredibly triggering. I was late to a lot of jobs in the early part of my career and it created conflict. I finally realized that being late generally means one or more people have to wait around for you wasting their time. Not ok.

4. Work hard. I eventually realized that my actions and my circumstances were linked, but that was something I learned on my own. This literally ruined my educational career. Without being able to see tangible benefits from doing the work it was basically impossible to be motivated. I'm extremely motivated by money, but less tangible benefits are still hard to be motivated for.

5. Cook. I spent most of my disposable money on eating out because eating at home meant TV Dinners which are disgusting and reminded me far too much of my childhood. This has resulted in my struggling with obesity for my entire life.

And so very much more. The reality is that poor people are often poor because their parents did a truly terrible job of teaching them what they needed to know to be successful adults... Which they then pass on to their children. In a society with plenty of opportunities poverty should probably be treated as a disease that needs to be cured rather than just a lack of money or opportunity.

I'm not trying to speak for all poor people here. There's a real difference between poor people who are grinding their way out of poverty and those who aren't. Those who are progressing need (and deserve!) vast amounts of support to cure what they usually acquired through no fault of their own. Those who aren't improving should probably be treated as though they have some kind of horrific hereditary disease that needs to be contained.

The poors aren't a protected group. They come from every ethnicity (all of my experience is with poor whites basically) and they have all sorts of major issues that are related to being long term poor and nothing else.

It's a discussion about what to do about automation for sure... It's hard to argue we have a solution to the future problem when we haven't come remotely close to solving the current one with people whose dysfunction is incompatible with the current economic system.

EDIT: And you're one to talk lol. You're a full blown libertarian who would probably be ok with them starving as a solution.

Yeah, not giving you a hard time. I just thought it was cool how traders get to the heart of the problem very quickly and without any varnish. I think the market tends to scour away bull**** and bull****ters, leaving only hardened rationalists, and people good at getting other people to give them money. I'm probably a lot further socialist than you think. I favor libertarian solutions when they lead to good social outcomes, which is almost always in the long run.

People ITT are way underestimating the rampant hipster consumer culture that we live in. If you put the words artisinal, handmade, etc on a label you can charge 3x as much. People will pay much more for meat from animals raised by a human farmer on a real farm than they will from an animal raised by robots in a factory farm.

I'm a pastry cook. Everything I make could've been made by robots 20 years ago. None of it would involve advanced AI. So why do I still have a job? The entire food service industry could've been almost completely automated already, the reason it hasn't is because the consumer doesn't want it to, not because we don't have the technology.

Everyone is so focused on the hypothetical possibility that robots could do everything, which is true. The fact is they won't though, because most consumers are willing to pay more for stuff that's made/designed/served by people. And this tendency will get more common as robots get more common. Hipsterism is a revolt against the perceived mainstream. As robots get more mainstream, people will like robots less.

Human interaction is way more complex than you think. You sound like a super-aspie.

Ish. My biggest issues with libertarians is their hand waving of the 'free market' free riding on negative externalities of their business. For instance KO and PEP should probably be on the hook for 25% of our national healthcare spending for diabetes... And the actual sugar companies should be on the hook for another 50%+. And cigarette taxes are bizarrely not high enough.

Basically I'm for simplicity in government. It's painfully obvious that the whole system was captured by lawyers (and later accountants) long ago... Regulations aren't the problem, complex regulations are. The government is demonstrably terrible at doing anything that isn't super dumbed down. If we're going to keep complex regulations they need to be administered by an impartial as possible AI that can answer the question 'is this legal' in black and white in <5 seconds.

For instance I'm a huge fan of UBI for no other reason than it allows us to stop giving people money with specific earmarks for food/housing/healthcare/education. Those earmarks are complicated and are used to justify vast amounts of government spending on administration that is pretty much just dead weight loss.

Where subjective decisions need to be made they should be made as locally as possible imo. Nobody knows where the roads should go in my city better than the people who live here. I don't see why we should have to make sure that our infrastructure projects comply with literally thousands of government rules to get federal tax money (which originally came from us of course... like all cities my city pays out vastly more than it receives back from the federal govt)

Would you get implanted with a blockchain/wallet chip if you received top-ups every month deposited to it?

No. I'm actually the guy who is always actively trying to be LESS connected. Sorry- I have enough security concerns without giving hackers one more way to get at me. I resent the fact that I have to make sure my name, address, and phone number aren't a google search away every couple of months.

Me and the rest of the 'my wifi pw is a random 24 digit alphanumeric' crowd aren't going to be first in line for stupid crap like that lol.

I'll get one at the same time period I got Lasik... When it becomes so inexpensive/normal that I'm 100% certain that it works and it's so cheap that it pencils out almost immediately. (saving 300/year in glasses for 1800 that you get 0% financing on for a year is an obviously good deal)

Sure! But only if it has 666 engraved neatly on it.

The major problem with the future is when robots become viable sexually. Then we're dead.

And Lasik is pure gold now.

You mean sexual in order to reproduce? Why would they need that? They're not organic.

Or do you mean enslave us with awesome sex robots? Yay?

He is talking about the rapebot army. Which will be an accidental outcome when a super AI is programmed to make people happier.

I was simplifying for the sake of making a point that human-to-robot interaction could one day be preferable to human-to-human interaction. Obviously there are enormous textbooks detailing all the currently known complexities of human interaction, and a lot more is being discovered or rewritten by the day. Thanks for the helpful post!

My argument is human interactions are changing due to technology, and once the drive for males to attract females is diminished, our advancement as a species will change.

It is related to the theory that human population will grow exponentially and we are all dead by next July.

Unfortunately, those textbooks are full of fraud, p-hacking, poor methodology, lousy statistics, etc. You can trust about 5% of it. Which 5%, you ask?

Hopefully soon an AI can tell us

I understand your logic but don't really think we have to worry too much about that one...

The extent to which technology kills jobs is proportional to how inexpensive they make life. If we don't need human beings to grow crops or weave clothes or build machines, it means the cost of producing these things will be dropping like a rock.

How much do raw materials cost?
It's based on the cost to excavate and ship them.
What determines excavation and shipping costs?
Labor and machinery.
What's the cost of machinery? Labor and raw materials.
.... and then loop back to the start.

Labor is the driver of almost all cost in society.