80% of working-age people will be engaged in programming things, and being paid to do it? I think that sounds like a magical economy. I wonder how soon we can expect to live in it.
If the impact is so huge, robot labor will have to be heavily taxed to support a decent universal income. If someone paid me let’s say, 60% of my current income so I can stop working and become a mediocre bohemian artist for the rest of my life, I’m totally down. Hello Space Socialism!
Me too! Of course, the question is, if our brilliant future will depend on space socialism to solve the ills of society, why can’t we have some space socialism right now? Why wait and learn math while we wait?
I think that we’re seeing major innovations that enable cost effective automation across the board, and the result is going to be that we see a dramatic shift of the economy in the next 10 years.
I also don’t think that automation is simply going to remove existing jobs, but rather also create new ones for interacting with those autonomous systems in new ways.
You think that in 10 years, 80% of working-age people will have good-paying jobs that involve programming?
I would hope automation gets rid of some jobs. It would be nice to replace the absolute shit jobs at the bottom with automation. I’m not sure how society is going to deal with this outside UBI or something similar.
I don’t think this is going to happen magically in 10 years, but I assume we’re going to slowly boil that frog, and have all the terrible societal impacts of automating work and leaving people behind. Eventually we’ll get to the place where you either don’t work and get some amount of money, or (a smaller and smaller fraction of people) serve the robot overlords and get a bit more money, but we’re not going to get there soon.
(The more I think about it, the more dystopian it gets, so I’ll stop typing here.)
I agree with this in all respects. It won’t solve extreme income inequality now, that’s for sure.
I think that both themes need to exist together. We need to both teach people how to best navigate their own personal path AND work to reduce inequality. Certainly the US leans too heavily into the first and not enough into the second but that doesn’t mean giving good personal advice is bad.
Actually I think it is a human trait not simply a US trait or a democratic trait to focus on how individuals can improve their state in life given the status quo.
Because the only way to magically snap the world into space socialism involves civil unrest on a scale no one wants to see. Better to work for the world we want while also living in the world we have.
I also think we need to do both, but doing the former isn’t in any way a solution to societal income inequality.
It’s hyperbole, my friend.
This may well be true, but it’s hard not to notice that there are many democracies with good economies and dramatically less income and wealth inequality than exists in the US. It’s almost like there are solutions other than teach everyone math. Maybe someone should tell Bill?
I’m just gonna post someone from Reddit’s summary of book series “The Expanse” and how life works on Earth in the future. It sounds depressingly on point - but it’s not UBI as you don’t get money you can spend on anything, but instead something more like life support.
Earth has 30 billion people on it, and advancements in robotics have all but eliminated any jobs in earthbound industry.
Every child on earth born legally (under the procreation restrictions) is granted free food, housing, medical care, and 3D-printer (for clothes and basic items) for the rest of their life. They do not get money. That’s the difference between the UN’s Basic Assistance (Basic) and real-life Universal Basic Income (UBI) - people on Basic get goods and services, people on UBI get money to pay for those goods and services.
Every child goes through school like in the 21st century, but school is significantly different. It’s heavily automated, with robotic teachers tailoring classes to each individual student’s needs. There is no AI in the Expanse, but there are incredibly advanced speech-recognition programs (recall Alex having conversations with the Roci that Siri would just commit suicide over).
Once students reach their late teens, they “graduate” from school and can either go back to Basic for the rest of their lives or start working a menial job not yet automated, like waiter, coffee shop/fast food attendant, etc. If you can last two years at this job without quitting, you have the option to either go back on Basic or go to university to learn a helpful skill and earn your place either in the UN Navy or in a real job.
Choosing to go on to university means you give up your Basic benefits, but you get real money to purchase things with. There are many (read: almost all) establishments on Earth that only accept money, not Basic tickets, so even though people with a job have less free time, they enjoy a much higher quality of life. The “middle class” as it were has the option of quitting their job and going back to Basic at any time.
Also, a longer write-up if you’re interested.
This stuff has a rich history, going back to things like Riders of the Purple Wage by Philip José Farmer, or — to a lesser extent — a book like Stand on Zanzibar. I think it’s pretty clear we are headed to some state like that. It’s not surprising to me because I’ve been reading about it coming since I was basically a child.
Thanks for the pointer, I don’t know The Expanse at all.
Edit: The modern parallel is to give the poor food stamps rather than money, while limiting what they can buy with those food stamps. Because it’s okay, somehow preferable, to give them basic food, but not to give them money they can use to buy what they want. And then, of course, if they make any money working, take the food stamps away.
[quote=“scottagibson, post:193, topic:158303”]
It’s hyperbole, my friend.[/quote]
The current zeitgeist of extremism and polarization has completely destroyed my hyperbole detector.
Sure I guess but I don’t see any imperative for Bill Gates to specifically address one theme and not the other. Especially given the fact that I have yet to see a decent solution to inequality that scales to everyone and deals with automation. As you say there is a long history of more or less dystopian solutions to inequity and automation but no real solutions.
Sure, that’s true, but it’s also true that, taken as a response to the question that was posed to him, his answer was at best a non sequitur and at worst a deception.
I don’t even know what this means. We can point to other democratic, free societies that have much lower income inequality, lower poverty and better social outcomes than we have, and we can even point to the policy decisions that lead to that outcome, e.g. higher taxes on higher incomes and more redistribution to people with lower incomes / no incomes. It’s not a mystery how we can do better. We just don’t want to. Or, to be more clear, people like Bill Gates don’t want to.
It’s true that what’s coming may be a much greater problem, but even if we can’t imagine how we will solve that problem, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bother to try to solve the problems we have right now.
My long standing mid 20th century dystopian writer’s joke about automation is that after we’ve automated production out of the hands of humans it will become more efficient to automate consumption. The ideal choosy AI robot that will make perfectly irrational decisions about what consumer products it wants, thereby eliminating pesky human labor consumers from the economy, with all their demands for food and medical care, all of which tend towards being low profit margin industries.
Robots making goods for robots to consume. It’s the only way to increase the size of the market past Mathusian limits of the planet once humans have reached them. The ultimate end point of tech capitalism is a handful of tech bros owning a self reproducing economy (and the whole world) in a human empty planet.
This would make a good comic novel, a world of machine overlords that have eliminated humanity so that they can more efficiently mimic human economic behavior.
Yea it’s pretty much the runaway paper clip AI, except it’s still ultimately run and owned by humans. It’s not “smart” but takes maximizing efficiency gains of technology to their comic / horrible conclusion (that the most efficient economy is without most humans at all).
It’s also the worry / observation that the big problem for Tech Bro / STEM economics is the need for a mass people to consume the products they develop. We can’t all be programmers and “producers”. But there’s not really any economic theory in Tech Bro economics for how consumers are supposed to exist. It’s either Programmer or Barista, Developer or Postmates delivery, all basically branches of the immediate vicinity around the Tech Office. How things like concrete get made or roads get paved seems… like an uninteresting, superfluous question.
Next they’ll be gambling on the outcome of robot cage matches. “100 quatloos on the newcomers”, they’ll shout.
And also because not being anywhere near enough jobs is a standing monetary policy specifically so there’s no pressure for them to pay well. Small little detail. On the other hand, knowing math would help in workers doing the math, so, weirdly, it would eventually help…
Would that be after or before self-crashing cars don’t?
Oh, no, we’re moving on from that! Evolving from not paying the bottom a livable wage, it’s also not becoming profitable enough to provide them with goods compared to luxury versions. For ex, the UK had shelves empty of eggs, except for very profitable organic ones. The masses are entirely dispensable, except for, see above, the threat of unemployment on the dwindling worker middle class.
I was going to recommend the national razor, but I know from watching Glass Onion the way to get back at Tech Bros who ruin and kill people is create a madcap series of events where they are embarrassed in public and stop being popular on social media, so let’s try that first.