'Robots Won't Just Take Our Jobs -- They'll Make the Rich Even Richer' (theguardian.com) 644
Robotics and artificial intelligence will continue to improve -- but without political change such as a tax, the outcome will range from bad to apocalyptic, writes technology and politics journalist Ben Tarnoff, citing experts and studies, for The Guardian. From the article, shared by six anonymous readers: Despite a steady stream of alarming headlines about clever computers gobbling up our jobs, the economic data suggests that automation isn't happening on a large scale. The bad news is that if it does, it will produce a level of inequality that will make present-day America look like an egalitarian utopia by comparison. The real threat posed by robots isn't that they will become evil and kill us all, which is what keeps Elon Musk up at night -- it's that they will amplify economic disparities to such an extreme that life will become, quite literally, unlivable for the vast majority. A robot tax may or may not be a useful policy tool for averting this scenario. But it's a good starting point for an important conversation. Mass automation presents a serious political problem -- one that demands a serious political solution. Automation isn't new. In the late 16th century, an English inventor developed a knitting machine known as the stocking frame. By hand, workers averaged 100 stitches per minute; with the stocking frame, they averaged 1,000. This is the basic pattern, repeated through centuries: as technology improves, it reduces the amount of labor required to produce a certain number of goods. So far, however, this phenomenon hasn't produced extreme unemployment. That's because automation can create jobs as well as destroy them. What's different this time is the possibility that technology will become so sophisticated that there won't be anything left for humans to do. What if your ATM could not only give you a hundred bucks, but sell you an adjustable-rate mortgage?
Bull (Score:5, Informative)
"By hand, workers averaged 100 stitches per minute; with the stocking frame, they averaged 1,000. This is the basic pattern, repeated through centuries: as technology improves, it reduces the amount of labor required to produce a certain number of goods. So far, however, this phenomenon hasn't produced extreme unemployment."
Yes, it did. Automatic steam-powered weaving machines caused the birth of the Union movement, because hundreds of thousands lost their jobs worldwide.
Just nobody cared at the time and the rich did get richer then as well.
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Yep. nothing new at all.
The scale has just changed to a point where it will break society. This started a while ago and we've muddled through (invented endless desk jobs type stuff) but it's starting to really not work anymore and widespread automation replacing unskilled laborers is only getting started. The next generation of robots are gonna be gnarly...
Boston Dynamics has shown where we're headed and it's very, very capable robots. After the darpa challenge door opening buffoonery it seemed a way off, b
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The Butlerian Jihad. Destroy the "thinking machines" to liberate humanity.
Rich are winning class war [Re: Bull] (Score:5, Insightful)
The rich are spending billions to kill off unions by a combination of (legally) bribing politicians, and propping up plutocrat-kissing pundits like Fox News, Rush, and Breitbart to convince the voting population that unions kill jobs and the economy.
The rich are winning the class war because they can buy more and bigger weapons.
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Sadly, I've seen this on multiple scales - "downtrodden" working class people who think it's in their best interests to make the rich richer so that a little more can trickle down to their level.
No, it's not a zero-sum game. But, the more people who have a surplus, the faster things get better for everyone - if all the wealth gets concentrated into a very few hands, you're back at feudal states - and life's not really better for anyone in that scenario, lots of contrast for the guys at the top vs the botto
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The propagandists use another trick, claiming that if the gov't or unions get big in general, then they will use their power to do "anti-Christian" things, like build gender-neutral restrooms and make Christians pay for them. Bundled FUD.
Re:Rich are winning class war [Re: Bull] (Score:5, Insightful)
Black Mirror, Season One, Episode 2 (I think) - virtual value is bull----. What's the point of working if all you get is a new hat for your avatar that doesn't even exist in the real world? Just because stuff has a price doesn't mean it's good, or has value. So much "value" created today is just a way to waste people's spare time, which they apparently have far too much of. And it doesn't have to be "virtual" product like avatars, or movies, music, or books. Walk through Target / WalMart / KMart / JCPenney / Sears / Dillards / Bonwitt Teller / Neimann Marcus / Whatever and behold the array of stuff, so very very much stuff of so very very little life enhancing value. A 60" TV does not enhance your life 2x as much as a 19" screen - better? sure, more valuable? a little, life changing? not really much at all. That array of stores all carries clothing, some at quite dramatically varying price points - is the $200 shirt really 20x better than the $10 one? Oh, yes, anyone can tell the $200 shirt looks better, but 20x better? Even 5x better on sale? Hardly.
Re:Rich are winning class war [Re: Bull] (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rich are winning class war [Re: Bull] (Score:5, Insightful)
Then what they will be buying themselves, eventually, is civil war.
The owner-class won't worry about that. They'll be directing their hunter/killer robots from within their walled off enclaves.
Seriously. Once the dirty business of producing food, clothing, shelter, and high-tech toys is fully automated, why would the .1% want the unwashed masses around, other than for entertainment?
Re:Rich are winning class war [Re: Bull] (Score:4, Insightful)
Local unions might be a good idea, but the AFL/CIO style national unions are themselves big corrupt corporations, so in practice being unionized just means you have two sets of rich people screwing you over.
Re:Rich are winning class war [Re: Bull] (Score:4, Informative)
1) Government workers and government worker unions are apples/oranges compared to private-sector unions. They operate under vastly different environments, parameters, and conditions.
2) You're misrepresenting the argument: the actual reason for busting the public school employee unions (and not the NEA or AFT, which are national teacher unions) was to remove forced-membership requirements and the massive fraud/waste/abuse (and not a little political abuse) that had sprung from its membership and leadership.
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Technological advancements can't result in long-term widescale job loss. Because if it does, the masses wouldn't be able to buy as much stuff, and it would reduce the country's net productivity, meaning a smaller pie for the rich to take their disproportionate slice from. Free market economics views reduced productivity as an inefficiency, and tries to get rid of it (ac
Re:Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
Technological advancements can't result in long-term widescale job loss. Because if it does, the masses wouldn't be able to buy as much stuff, and it would reduce the country's net productivity, meaning a smaller pie for the rich to take their disproportionate slice from.
That seems like an argument for why it would be bad for technological advancements to result in job loss -- which is a very different thing than an argument for why they can't result in job loss.
If you think the individually-rational decisions of various companies will always guarantee a universally-positive outcome for the market as a whole, then you've never experienced a market crash or a tragedy-of-the-commons. The "invisible hand" is not an infallible guide.
because only a government can deprive people of freedom to make their own economic decisions
Another canard -- there's nothing particularly unique about governments in that respect. Any sufficiently powerful entity can deprive people of freedom to make their own economic choices, and private corporations also do it all the time. Read about the "company store" for miners, or the conditions in which migrant agricultural workers were (and are) held. It's no good to say "well, they're technically free to walk away whenever they want" if, as a practical matter, they do not have the economic resources to do so.
That freedom is what allows people to increase their standard of living - by individually choosing more productive activities over less.
And what do you do when there is no activity that you are capable of that is economically productive, because anything you could do, a machine can do better and more cheaply? Hope that other people will buy your (inferior and more expensive) products/services out of sympathy for your plight?
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One problem with your theory. The rich can't get richer if the masses can't afford to buy the shiny new toys being made by the robots.
You're still trying to think of money as an absolute. Money is a proxy for labor, and represents buying power.
What happens when you pay your workers the same wage and have them work the same hours, but you only employ 50% as many workers? You're making high-end induction stoves for $2,800 today and selling them for $3,200 (14% gross profits, and 9% net profits in your business). Suddenly, it costs you $1,400 to make that high-end induction stove; if your business keeps its 9% net operating profit, you
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Technical progress makes the poor and middle-classes richer. The pie gets twice as big, everyone gets like 1.9x as much, and the rich get 2.1x as much, and people go, "Oh god, the wealth gap is growing! Rich get richer while the poor get poorer!" because their slice appears to be a smaller radius of the (now-enormous) pie than it was of the (then-anemic) one they had before. They all get fat off cheap calories when their great-grandparents were struggling to get barely enough food to survive, and they still bitch that they're poorer than the hard-working men of the 1820s.
Yes, we are all getting richer, which is great. I read a great book a while ago and this was basically the gist of it. The name escapes me at the moment.
However, that doesn't mean a growing wealth gap is a good thing. Wealth drives quality of life (which is generally getting better for all), but it also is pretty much a direct proxy for power. As that wealth gap grows, power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Power--unlike quality of life-- is a zero sum game; if someone gains it, others lose it. And
Re:Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
I see a flaw:
What happens when you pay your workers the same wage and have them work the same hours, but you only employ 50% as many workers? ...Mind you, because that stove is only $1,673, the households which historically bought the $1,800 models can now buy your previously-$3,200 model in the same budget (although the $1,800 models will also be cheaper). Most likely, you'll move more product
But now, only 50% of the people have jobs. So there are fewer households that can afford the $1,800 models.
Consider this scenario, then let me tie it into your scenario:
There are 4 farmers. The farmers share their grazing land, but each one keeps the profits from shearing their own sheep. Each farmer starts with 10 sheep. Each farmer asks "should I buy another sheep?" Well, since they keep the profits from the sheep they buy, but share the costs, each farmer decides it is economical to buy another sheep. But now, each farmer found their cost increased by 1 full sheep, not 1/4 of a sheep, but it increased by 1/4 of a sheep for the sheep they bought and 3/4 for the 3 sheep the other farmers bought. Lesson: "Local optimization does not lead to global optimization."
Now in your scenario, the product price dropped because one company cut its labor by 50%. That resulted in fewer households who can afford $1,800. But this is just one employer out of millions. So the resulting reduction from the layoffs does not significantly reduce the number of total households that can afford the $1,800 models. However, what if all the other factories do the same thing? This problem starts to look a lot like the sheep scenario. Each factory saves money by reducing their own labor pool, but they share the customers pool. But if all factories do this same labor and cost reduction, it starts to impact the pool of customers. The short-term winner is the company that can cut costs faster than other companies. But eventually, everyone loses.
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Once they have robots to build them all the shiny toys they want, and all of the capital they already have, they don't need "money" from plebs anymore. They continue to get richer in the way that really matters, the material goods and services available to them through the labor of the robots they own upon the capital they already own, and all the schmucks that they used to sell things to for money with which to employ them (to labor upon the capital they already own, including to make the things that they
Re:Bull (Score:4, Insightful)
Do correct me if I have a glaring misconception, but it seems to me that if robots are doing enough of the work, the rich can use their power to obviate the poor. Of what use are the poor if there's no demand for their work, and you have nothing to gain by trading with them because automation can create whatever is most valuable to you? What is the point of personal economic liberty if most people have no wealth to make decisions about?
Re:Bull (Score:5, Insightful)
At some point though, the rich won't need money from the masses. They will be able to just directly order their robo-factories to directly build their yachts and mega-mansions, using robo-manufactured components built from robo-harvested raw materials. If they don't personally own robo-companies that have what they need, they can just trade with other 1%ers who do own the right robo-resources.
They probably will need a few lesser humans (at least in the beginning) to fill in the gaps that robots can't (yet) do. But that will just be an issue of enticing the best of the best non-1%ers with the opportunity to live in the servants' wing of their robo-built mansion and eat the leftovers of their robo-harvested food.
Right now they only need money from the masses so they can use that money to employee the masses. That dependancy goes away of you already own vast armies of robots that serve you for free.
Re:Bull (Score:5, Interesting)
Maybe this is the endgame of human evolution. Instead of having 7 billion people, of whom 1% are rich (that's 70 million): perhaps you have a human population of 70 million rich people, and about 7 billion robots? Not so scary if you are one of the 1%. I just don't want to be around during the transition period.
Sure they can (Score:3)
Re:Sure they can (Score:4, Insightful)
Just like how a malnourished serf couldn't stand up to a well fed Knight in armor.
Ask the leaders of the malnourished French of yesteryear how that went.
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I think we've reached the point where goods and services shouldn't really be the target anymore. Anyone can fill their domicile floor to ceiling with "goods" purchased at big-box retailers, even on a minimum wage salary. Ideally, services should top out at a smaller percentage of the economy than they already are - if we all spend our time "serving" each other, making up false problems like insurance coding and billing, tax accounting, real-estate representation... what's the point?
The old saw of "a commo
Re:Bull (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Bull (Score:4, Interesting)
How do goods get made?
Answer: Goods are made by the application of labor. If you have a method by which you slowly assemble a chair, you can make 1 chair per hour; thus, for us to buy those chairs, we must pay you a fraction of your labor time--if you work 40 hours per week, we must pay you 1/40th--in terms of a wage equal to that fraction of your living expense. Carry this out, and the money you must receive has to pay the wages involved in producing those things that you buy. That is the minimum.
If you find a way to do it in half the time, you make 2 chairs per hour, and you live at the standard of living produced by 80 times the price at which you sell a chair.
he assumed that if X amount of labor went into an object, then it's worth X (whatever X is in inflation adjusted dollars).
The chair isn't worth X; if you make 100 chairs for 10 hours of labor and someone immediately figures out how to do 100 chairs in 1 hour of labor, everyone buys his chairs and yours rot. That means...
if no one wants to buy that widget, then it's not worth three hours of labor.
It's not going to sell for three hours's worth of labor; it's going to sell for what people are willing to buy.
many objects are worth much more than the labor required to produce them.
No, many objects sell for much more than the labor required to produce them. Primarily, things which are quite expensive or for which most people do not have a need or desire have a very small demand market. This low demand means entering the supplier market is risky, and tends to lead to failure. As such, there is little competition; and the people buying your stuff tend to be quite well-funded, so hiking prices is actually viable.
Many luxury objects have entered the realm of cheap mass-production as technology marches on. When they do, the net margins of businesses producing them--that is, the labor required to produce plus the labor required to organize as the cost underlies the price--tend to shrink. Suppliers can enter the market readily due to the ability to produce cheaper than the next guy and a vast basis of consumers.
Goods do not have value. People have an imaginary valuation of a good: they envision, in their minds and as a property of their own beliefs, that a value is attributable to a good. The good does not have any such worth; it has a cost and a price.
That cost is labor--or the wage-labor as the price of labor times the amount of labor. Wage inequality essentially means my 1 hour of $20/hr work can induce another man to work 2 hours at $10/hr; and taxes, profits, and even savings generally tend to pay wages eventually, by infrastructure and government services, expansion and risk controls (business profits cover later losses), or delayed spending. Some money does vanish off into giant stockpiles, and is replaced by more debt issued into the economy.
The only thing that has to balance out, absolutely, is the labor exchange: all exchanged goods and services must equate, eventually, to all labor which has been invested in the exchange of those goods and services--including idle labor which was drawing a paycheck and accounted for in the price of goods and services exchanged. That's a physical law. You can't spend 100 hours making cars at a rate of 1 car per 50 hours and end up with 3 cars.
Yes, that means some of your money goes into idle workers, into goods produced and unsold and taken as a loss, and into all kinds of other horse shit that doesn't materialize as an addition of wealth. It happens.
So. . . Robots. . . (Score:5, Funny)
. . . . they'll take err jerbs ???
(sorry, couldn't resist. . .)
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ATM could sell you an adjustable rate mortgage (Score:4, Informative)
Well, then I'd tell the ATM to go fuck itself, since adjustable rate mortgages are a scam, then I'd go find a different ATM that would sell me a fixed rate mortgage.
The first ATM would of course end up needing a machine-government bailout because it's too big to fail.
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Adjustable rate mortgages are usually cheaper than fixed rate mortgages.
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The problem is that they look good until the economy tumbles and you get caught in that round of layoffs. You're taking a big risk by taking out an ARM unless you're either in a stable enough financial position that you don't really need the money, in which case one might reasonably ask why you'd take out the mortgage in the first place, not to mention why you didn't just get a fixed-rate mortgage with a shorter term.
The main reason for an ARM is so that if you know you're in a position to pay a lot of mo
the proliferation of horses (Score:5, Insightful)
will mean our city will be ten foot deep in manure in less than a quarter century!
Alarmists need to stop thinking any one thing can be extrapolated to the future without society and technology changing and adapting. And no, tax as an attempt to slow or stall inevitable progress is not a solution at all.
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you assert consequences without a shred of evidence
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Are the 190 SOL or did they go into sales, marketing, distribution, customer relations, support, IT.....?
What our country HAS been doing is allowing other countries with no or inadequate worker safety protections to trade as equal partners which is wrong.
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So what did the Romans do with all those extra slaves?
Gladiators [wikipedia.org]
Err, guys? (Score:5, Insightful)
If the vast majority of humanity becomes unemployed (which is what this apocalyptic scenario implies), then no one will be buying the products that these robots make. Without customers and the money/purchasing they bring, businesses tend to collapse fairly quickly. You could counter with "well, the rich will just buy stuff from each other", but 1) the scale won't be there to justify the automation in most cases, and 2) in economics, just like in biology, when the genetic pool gets too small for a species, the result eventually becomes extinction.
Look, I get it, but honestly, this is the same argument that was being advanced 100 years ago when electricity was automating things (and 'OMG that Westinghouse guy is going to have more money than a god while the rest of us starve!'), 200 years ago when steam was automating things, etc etc. People have always adapted, shifted their career focus, and created new industries which are not as easily automated. Unless someone can come up with an argument showing how this time will be different (hint: it probably won't), then this is just a rehash of an old argument.
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Re:Err, guys? (Score:4, Interesting)
Not only that but it gives our society a chance to ask some good questions. Such as, "Does work really matter?" and "Why must a person earn a living?". When for all practical purposes our base necessities are taken care of automatically, why should anyone labor?
I think that question is something a lot of the very wealthy, and mostly those who are newly wealthy, are afraid of asking. If not more than a little jealous of.
Re:Err, guys? (Score:5, Interesting)
Can't name replacements [Re:Err, guys?] (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the evidence: nobody can identify the new fields that are replacing the old ones, unlike the past. Sure, there are new fields, but they not appearing in sufficient quantity to replace those lost. And even those fields are being offshored to cheap-labor countries.
For example, craigslist employs about 60 people, but has probably killed tens or hundreds of thousands of newspaper-related jobs in the process.
Re: (Score:2)
> Look, I get it, but honestly, this is the same argument that was being advanced 100 years ago when electricity was automating things
Not really. If the device is *smarter* than you, then it really is something different. Automation to date has shifted employment from moving your arms to thinking about things. If the automation of the future outthinks you, then what do we do? Of course, if they are smarter than us, I suspect they will solve the problem for us anyway.
That said, I believe there is 0% chanc
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One single example, the great Famine of Madras Presidency killed more people than the entire Irish Potatoe famine. Need to dig up the numbers.
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An automation tax dumped directly into basic income (also all the welfare aspects dumped into the same basic income) would solve everything and progress would continue.
It won't solve everything, but it will avert immediate apocalypse.
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Yeah, but you are assuming people will bother to work at all. If You've already got a livable income without working, many people will never enter the workforce. But I guess that's cool if the robots are doing all of the work.
I see something like this happening in a distant future: The values we place things will be changed drastically. That robot stitched synthetic silk suit is nice, but the human made, real silk suit is the status symbol you are looking for. Think picking between the "organic" oranges fo
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Remember kids... (Score:2)
Past performance is no guarantee. (Score:2)
the economic data suggests that automation isn't happening on a large scale
And 10 years ago, lthe economic data said that smartphone app sales were not happening at all (since there was no such thing as an app store until 2008). Some people need to re-learn the lessons about "tipping points" or watch how even something as seemingly innocuous as a loud sound can trigger an avalanche that destroys all in its' path.
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What's the difference between a tipping point and a bifurcation point?
I suggest... (Score:2)
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wrong wrong wrong (Score:2)
This has exactly zero to do with "robots taking [someone's] jobs" and everything to do with the tax code and the government's attitude towards the majority of the people.
Robot tax is infeasible (Score:3)
Feasible solution is progressive taxation combined with guaranteed income. Fundamentally, it isn't 1% getting Ferengi-rich, it is that the rest of us are forced to play Jem'Hadar as a result.
Re:Robot tax is infeasible (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Self-sufficiency (Score:2)
This is why we need to develop 3D printing and CNC machinery ASAP, so we won't be dependent on mass-produced goods shipped around the world to meet our needs.
The day we can download a pair of sneakers and have them made on the spot, we will have technology working for us rather than against us.
Oh, but I guess we'll still have to ship lots of raw materials around... rubber, metal, plastic, wood etc. I don't mind so much if robots do that part.
The problem here is... (Score:3, Insightful)
...thinking you are entitled to be the one to sell me an adjustable-rate mortgage. It doesn't need selling if I already know what I want. It is not enough to produce something... you must produce something of value. Full stop. Articles like this give me the sense that the author is irritated by the fact that status quo isn't good enough. There is plenty of work to do, it just might not be the work you are accustomed to doing, and arguments like this have been debunked over and over again. The cotton gin obviated a lot of jobs, but people rose up and did more sophisticated work. Computers obviated a lot of jobs, but people rose up and did more sophisticated work. Robots and AI will obviate a lot of jobs, and people will still rise up and do more sophisticated work. The moral of the story here is get up off your lazy ass and do more sophisticated work. We've not yet begun to reach our potential as a race.
ObManna (Score:5, Interesting)
Already covered in Marshall Brain's book "Manna" [marshallbrain.com].
The real problem is not the robots. It's the humans.
If you use robots to further your greed, then yes, the rich get richer. If you use robots to help out humanity, surprise! They help out humanity. (It should be noted that Manna actually has a form of Universal Basic Income which is used to manage resources).
Can I just ask: How much is enough? (Score:2)
Make the Rich Even Richer
How rich does anyone need to be? I understand the desire to have more and, certainly, a bit more than you need, but way more than you could possibly ever need or even use? How much is enough and why?
and people who trash the robots go to prsion bette (Score:2)
and people who trash the robots go to prison (better then the street) and with doctors that don't say we don't take medcade and do more then the ER does. I think the max cost is a $100 copay / year in TX.
and... rich is bad? (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see "the rich" becoming richer as a problem. If poor people are becoming poorer, in absolute terms, then we have a problem. I don't see that happening, however, since increased robotic productivity should normally (free of government interference) result in more abundant goods and services, raising the living standard for everyone. Sure, the rich will reap most of the gains, but that is because they own the robots.
So, what is the solution? Pretty straightforward, actually: own the robots! As luck would have it, we live in an age in which it has never been easier for anyone to invest in the future. This implies, of course, that people are smart enough to forego buying that luxury condo and partying away their paycheck in favor of planning for the day that that paycheck won't be there any more. I admit, I may be assuming too much about the average person's capacity for delayed gratification.
that's it! (Score:2)
"I hate all this inequality and progress! I'm going to move to an egalitarian paradise, like ____!"
Unfortunately, people never actually follow through on the second part, because it means moving to places like Venezuela, Cuba, or Greece.
Don't give banks any ideas. (Score:5, Funny)
What if your ATM could not only give you a hundred bucks, but sell you an adjustable-rate mortgage?
Some people take so long at the ATM I wonder WTF they are doing - international banking, hostile takeover - what, What, WHAT? Jesus! So please don't give the banks any more ideas for ATM functions.
The rich benefit from status quo AND change. (Score:3)
It's usually a safe bet that any change will make the rich richer, provided the change is not catastrophic.
The reason is that adapting to change, for a prudent rich person, is trivially easy. It's a matter of portfolio management; you could reduce it to an algorithm if you like. The main reasons fortunes are lost is investing for ego, rather than a high but sustainable reward/risk.
But you ought to keep an eyeball on that "not catastrophic" proviso.
Since the mid 80s in the United States the median household has seen its purchasing power increase by 14%, as opposed to 150% for the top percentile. That might not seem like a bad deal all around, but the median household's purchasing power is inflated by a drop in the price of things like consumer electronics -- basically all the stuff we buy from China. If you look at the cost of the things we buy from America, the price has gone up precipitously: child care, education, medical services, energy. Many of these things are difficult or impossible to economize on.
Consequently if you look at accumulated weath, the wealth of the median household has actually dropped 30% since 1985. The bottom quartile of households have seen their accumulated wealth drop by 80% since '84.
This has become a very close to a crisis situation -- witness the 2016 election, which was driven by feelings of economic insecurity. The widespread adoption of robotic replacements for low-skilled labor would tip the balance into catastrophe. The collapse of incomes in the bottom quartile would destabilize the country.
The AI of a Pathological Society (Score:3)
I posit we have become increasingly pathological as a species.
Due to evolutionary lag our brains haven't evolved to process the kinds of threats posed to us by pollution, carbon, nuclear and externalities from business and industry, we are 50,000 years behind the society we have created. We can't even agree enough to change the fundamental laws driving all the corruption that creates this toxic mess, the day to day business of corporations legally obliged to deliver profits to shareholders whilst funding politicians and lawmakers playing an arcane obsolete game of left and right politics.
So how can we expect to create an AI that isn't pathological, whilst at the same time needing AI to overcome our own inadequacies?
If you take a sincere look around you will see our whole planet is on life support, which translates to our entire species is on life support, because there is seven billion of us using resources. This is the paradox of our survival, what constitutes 'fit' in a Darwinian sense if we destroy the very biosphere that sustains us while building machines with dominion over us?
Humanity is worthy to survive however we are destructive enough to know we will build an AI for war that opens the door to our own doom. We know because curiosity is in our nature and we have done it so many times before as we seek immortality and dominance. We cannot even admit to our own flaws, of which I am the worst offender. I am a selfish proud vain creature that knows any melding of myself with the machine will magnify my flaws a thousand times.
So knowing myself, I know that our species will have its flaws supremely magnified by any Generalized AI that evolves out of the specific AIs we create. A generalized AI that can write its own goals and form a narrative about 'itself' in the same way we all do must therefore be subject to corruption of its goals that manifest in us as pathological. Thought is the only thing that abstracts consciousness away from the body and the product of pathological thinking cannot be sane. Even if we knew what consciousness and sanity was, would a GAI develop an ego, unbounded from time? How do we even conceptualize that?
Nature show us dominance hierarchies are inevitable in complex systems so much so that even chimps wage war. If I had power over you, I would use it, the same way you would use it over me, that's how power works. Can we expect something that exceeds us in cognitive capabilities and the ability to manipulate the environment to not to dominate us well before it starts to manifest its own, unimaginably complex, pathological behaviors?
This is, in essence, what AI shows us. That we don't know what AI is because we don't know what we are. That we are not going to the stars without a GAI and we may not even survive ourselves *without* a GAI because, by far, *we* are the biggest threats to our survival. Unless we ourselves evolve beyond our own pathological behaviors there may be nothing left of us *other* than a GAI.
That is the paradox of humanities evolution.
Re:so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or we could just up corporate taxes and accept that full-time long-term employment in many sectors is a thing of the past.
Re:so what? (Score:5, Informative)
The CBO produced a report "THE INCIDENCE OF THE CORPORATE INCOME TAX" in which it states "A corporation may write its check to the Internal Revenue Service for payment of the corporate income tax, but that money must come from somewhere: from reduced returns to investors in the company, lower wages to its workers, or higher prices that consumers pay for the products the company produces."
And it goes on to say
"Although economists are far from a consensus about exactly who bears how much of the burden of the corporate income tax, the existing studies highlight the significant types of economic mechanisms as well as the empirical estimates necessary for further quantifying the burdens. CBO's review of the studies yields the following conclusions:
o The short-term burden of the corporate tax probably falls on stockholders or investors in general, but may fall on some more than on others, because not all investments are taxed at the same rate.
o The long-term burden of corporate or dividend taxation is unlikely to rest fully on corporate equity, because it will remain there only if marginal investment is not affected by those taxes. Most economists believe that the corporate tax system has some effect on investment decisions.
o Most evidence from closed-economy, general-equilibrium models suggests that given reasonable parameters, the long-term incidence of the corporate tax falls on capital in general.
o In the context of international capital mobility, the burden of the corporate tax may be shifted onto immobile factors (such as labor or land), but only to the degree that the capital and outputs of different countries can be substituted.
o In the very long term, the burden is likely to be shifted in part to labor, if the corporate tax dampens capital accumulation.
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Eventually people pay tax. Wow, that's insightful. Yes, doubtless labor will pay tax, as will shareholders, but taxes are part of life.
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Yes, everyone pays taxes. The problem is, taxes tend to be regressive in nature from the beginning. The rich can avoid them, the poor do not pay them, and they suck the life out of the middle class. You want to fix the problem with the dwindling middle class? Fix the tax system that punishes people for earning a living.
Re:so what? (Score:4, Interesting)
A basic income plus a flat income tax with no exceptions creates a centerward pressure toward the middle class. Tax everyone x% of all income no matter what, give everyone x% of the mean income as a tax credit, people who make the mean income see no difference, people who make below it get money, people who make above it pay for that.
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It's funny how some idiot conservatives like to claim that Mom and Pops are exactly the same as major corperations. Maybe there's such a thing as scale and size as while a "Mom and Pop" can be incorperated when the average citizen refers to "corporations" they are typical refering to national or international ones. Major corperations are also active in major areas of the economy where it is literally impossible for Mom and Pops to participate. Plus, in the few areas where they can actually participate Mom
Re: so what? (Score:3)
No it doesn't. Capitalism is just fine with a handful of people owning most of the wealth of the mankind which does not ensure the greatest possible wealth for mankind, but only for a small part of it. It also not nearly as efficient as your religious beliefs make it appear to you because concentrated wealth removes a large part of it from the economy. Less wealthy people don't sit on their money, they consume and that is what keeps an economy afloat.
Re:so what? (Score:5, Interesting)
If the AI/automation revolution actually happens then labor will no longer have any income on which to pay tax. For some time, productivity gains have accrued with capital and labor has gotten the short end of the stick. This is a bug in capitalism but we have largely worked around the bug through progressive taxes and inheritance taxes. However, if AI and automation replace all labor then capital no longer has a reason to keep labor around. Since the people with a lot of capital largely control the government don't expect any help from that quarter.
In the past automation has made people more efficient and enabled many new jobs to come into being. This time it's different, formerly automation replaced our muscles and we moved from manufacturing economies to service economies and let the automation largely do the manufacturing work. This time, the robots will be replacing our brains rather than our muscles and there won't be service jobs to switch to. More and more people will lose their jobs and be unable to find new ones while capital continues to increase their hold on the available money and power, creating a feedback loop where all capital ends up with a small portion of the population. Unless we do something now (while labor still has some power) we are unlikely to stop this from happening.
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Eventually people pay tax. Wow, that's insightful.
Don't knock it. Many people don't make the connection that corporations only collect the tax and that the tax burden ultimately falls on real individuals. Further they don't understand the burden can fall on several different groups and where it falls will depend on the elasticities of the specific markets. Just look at the arguments for a higher minimum wage. Virtually every proponent just assumes the burden will fall on investors through lower profit margins, not employees, not customers.
Re:so what? (Score:4, Interesting)
The way corporate profits and taxes are handled in the first place should be completely refactored.
100% of corporate profits should be paid as dividends, with automatic reinvestment of those dividends in the corporation (at a rate settable by each shareholder, defaulting to 100% reinvestment) in exchange for a greater share of the company (compared to those who opt not to reinvest).
Dividends are taxable, so the investors pay the tax, each at their own marginal tax rate (so small investors with meager incomes trying to save for retirement aren't taxed out the wazoo, but if some one individual personally owns vast swaths of the productive economy, they are).
Don't tax the corporation itself at all, because all of its profits are already being taxed at the shareholder level.
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Didn't you hear? Corporate taxes are eeeeeevil. The vast majority of Americans just voted in a president who will abolish all of these retrograde business un-friendly practices, single handedly - right after he gets that wall built.
All things can be solved with increased transparency and oversight. People can be fully employed monitoring and regulating the corporations. If there's ever an unemployment problem, commission a project to gather data about it, think-tank the results, philosophically discuss
Re:so what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Didn't you hear? Corporate taxes are eeeeeevil.
Actually, in many ways, they are. Corporate taxes are often seen as a way to make fat cats pay. But the opposite is true: corporate taxes tend to be regressive. If you tax a corporation, the money comes from some combination of shareholders, customers, and employees. The biggest shareholders are pension funds, holding the savings of middle class works. Big companies tend to make goods, while small companies provide services. So if you tax big companies, the tax burden is shifted to goods (disproportionately purchased by the poor) rather than services (disproportionately purchased by the rich). Corporate taxes also have pernicious side effects, such as pushing investment and jobs overseas.
If you want to target the rich, it is much better to make individual income taxes more progressive, rather than trying to do it indirectly by taxing corporations.
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Taxes are a necessary evil, and should be the last resort option. Not the go to solution for every liberal's wet dream.
Re:so what? (Score:4, Interesting)
Turn up your sarcasm detector, it looks like you've got it set to negative gain.
First, the majority of Americans didn't even vote in the Trump-Clinton election, 580 million people live in North America, 420 million more in South America, just under 130 million Americans voted in the election, and, as you point out, only 45.9% of them voted for the Trumpinator - so, I read the 2016 election as a "thumbs up" from roughly 6% of the American population in favor of Trump's image and policies. I'd wager much more than 7% of Americans would have voted against him, given the chance.
I used to work in small companies, where response to government oversight seemed like a huge burden on top of whatever it was we were trying to do. Now I work in a larger corporation where well over half of our resources are devoted to satisfying government oversight requirements - entire departments full of people who do nothing else, and all the other departments spend significant amounts of their time serving the needs of the regulatory departments. Oversight is necessary, and I think with strong transparency requirements the burden could actually be lessened, but it's no joke that we're already employing a huge number of people who do nothing but document and audit how other people work.
Re:so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the problem: That doesn't work this time around.
Back when agriculture was modernized so that we didn't need 70+ percent of the workforce in the production of food anymore, the people that worked on the fields before moved to the towns and worked in factories, and farmhands became factory workers. When factories started to modernize and automatize, people went into services and factory workers became waiters and salespeople.
The problem is that now we're replacing these people and there isn't anything they could move towards. There is no new sector opening that would hoover up that free workforce this time.
Re:so what? (Score:4, Insightful)
I see plenty of trash to pick up on the roadsides, landscaping that could be better tended, public spaces that could use more frequent cleaning and maintenance, infrastructure that could be better maintained, planets that need exploring and colonization... I don't think we actually lack for things to do, just the will to do them.
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Yes, let's pay gardeners $140,000/yr with medical insurance, retirement plan, etc. Sounds like a plan.
Re:so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
Numbers mean nothing.
Let's make it where people can spend their time tending public spaces, working basic infrastructure projects, or maintenance, or interesting high tech endeavors and have assurance of a decent place to live, raise a family, food and medical care. I don't give a damn what numbers you put on the scenario - provide for shelter, security, and well-being in exchange for tending to something that needs doing. If nothing needs doing, great - just don't take away people's shelter, security and well-being because somebody fucked up the quarterly forecast again.
If there's stuff that needs doing that nobody is interested in or apparently qualified to do, break out the incentives - higher pay, better benefits, lower working hour demands, whatever floats the boats to get qualified people to pick up those tasks instead of tending the local park garden.
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Re:so what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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so basically, you're expecting deflation. That'll be... fun...
You're also assuming that this new sector which will be hard to just automate from the get-go will nevertheless be feasible for existing service workers to pick up and perform - essentially, it must be based in something that's easy for the ordinary human but hard for a robot. Any ideas? Personally, the only thing I can see that may meet both of those qualifications is artistic creation. (Which puts me in mind of Melancholy Elephants, by Spider R
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Most 'creatives' aren't. It's just their excuse.
AI and automation superior to human labour (Score:5, Insightful)
What you're missing is that AI and automation is advancing to be GENERALLY more effective and more cost-effective than people's labour, GENERALLY, as in, across very wide swaths of potential tasks. That implies a profoundly changed game, and as far as automation vs humans, it will be zero-sum, because for just about any job category, the automation/AI will be the more effective and cost-effective hence market-selected option.
A lot of people don't seem to get that this crossing point (automation > human capability) is coming soon (and in many sectors has already come).
Individually, and in society and political culture, we have to GROK this, then go through the usual stages of grief:
Denial – The first reaction is denial. In this stage individuals believe the diagnosis is somehow mistaken, and cling to a false, preferable reality.
Anger – When the individual recognizes that denial cannot continue, they become frustrated, especially at proximate individuals.
Bargaining – The third stage involves the hope that the individual can avoid a cause of grief.
Depression – "I'm so sad, why bother with anything?";
Acceptance
And then, after not too long a grieving pause, we need to come up with real solutions (as contrasted with keeping the Mexicans, Chinese, and Indians out, which are misguided FAKE solutions.)
At the core of a real solution will be us reconceptualizing what people are here for and where we should get our self-worth.
At the core of a real solution needs to be fair and adequate ways of distributing the proceeds of a substantially automated economy.
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Skills training is no answer - VAT is the answer (Score:2)
Value-added Tax also known as Goods and Services Tax
should be levied on each organization which produces net revenue by transforming inputs into higher-value outputs in the economy.
The tax should be levied as a percentage of the revenue - input costs.
Bill Gates suggested income-taxing robots. Sounds good at first glance, but wait:
- How many people's work did one robot replace? 5? 20? 1/2?
- How many robots are there if 100,000 arms are controlled by one machine-learning computer program?
Re:ATM (Score:4, Interesting)
So asked the farmhand back two hundred years, who will drive those machines that mow your fields and harvest your potatoes? You cannot get rid of me!
True. we still need one person to drive that machine.
Instead of thousands harvesting by hand.
Who modifies it to keep up with new govt regs? (Score:2)
You can add to the list for quite a while before running out of things.
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Not if we take the whole thing to it's conclusion. If robots are capable of making themselves, then robots will eventually be had for the cost of materials. So maybe in the future poor people will have their own unemployed robots....
And robots mine, refine and transport the materials too.
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Re:Duh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Only in this scenario you are the ox...