UBI - If robots are taking jobs, their wages can be given to us

[Orphia Nay]

With enough taxes you can pay for anything. But I thought this was about lost wages, and I don't think there will be enough lost wages to cover everyone.

In addition, there would need to be other change in society to make it more fair and beneficial to all.

I've mentioned these things in the Circular Economy thread.

You didn't say that in the OP. You added it AFTER I asked the question - as a way to avoid saying that you hadn't even given the issue I reasied a single thought.

Sorry, I mistook you for Modified.

I don't have an answer. I did think about it.

I'm not a tax lawyer nor do I work for the ATO/IRS etc.

I'm sure it could be worked out whether to tax work by existing or only future robots.

Most problems can, on an individual basis, and/or in one way or another.

If you tax existing robots, the company is free to put the price up while it designs better practices, for example.

 

[rjh01]

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Yet another way would be to make all businesses cooperatives, with the profits shared between the workers. That way any labor-saving techniques would automatically result in higher wages and/or shorter hours.
<snip>

A slight modification of this would be for those who work in public companies to be paid partly in shares. These would not be able to be sold until the person left the company. But any dividends would be paid to the worker.

 

[Olmstead]

UBI is an inevitability. It might already be feasible, but eventually it will become necessary. The only question is whether the transition will be seamless or whether there will be a body count.

It's very hard to find jobs that couldn't be done by machines. Unless a job requires creative thinking, a machine could potentially do it faster, better, and cheaper than any human, and you can't expect the whole population to sustain themselves by creating or developing something new. My own job as a translator is slowly being eroded to the point where I'm often just a glorified proof-reader.

 

[rjh01]

UBI is an inevitability. It might already be feasible, but eventually it will become necessary. The only question is whether the transition will be seamless or whether there will be a body count.

It's very hard to find jobs that couldn't be done by machines. Unless a job requires creative thinking, a machine could potentially do it faster, better, and cheaper than any human, and you can't expect the whole population to sustain themselves by creating or developing something new. My own job as a translator is slowly being eroded to the point where I'm often just a glorified proof-reader.

Agreed. Soon there will be very few jobs for the unskilled. Then one of the few occupations they will be able to do would be crime. So give them a UBI and they will only have to keep themselves occupied and they will be ok.

Then maybe domestic servants may become a thing again. Clean the house, cook the meals everyday and look after the garden. They will be willing to work for minimum wages just for something to do.

 

[lomiller]

Overall productivity per human working hour will still be much higher though, and there will be much less need for labor.

We are nowhere near the upper limit of demand for goods and services, so instead of less employment we'd produce more.

 

[Leftus]

It is, but only because our economic system insists that people have to 'earn' money to get the things they need.

When everything had to be produced by manual labor this wasn't a problem, because there were plenty of jobs to go around. But once you add labor-saving devices that allow capitalists to amass wealth without human labor input, it breaks down. Then you find people having to work in 'BS' jobs that don't do anything except spread the wealth around.

A UBI is one way to solve this problem. Another would be for businesses to pay their workers enough that they don't have to waste time on BS to earn enough money to live.

Henry Ford on instituting the 5-day week


Yet another way would be to make all businesses cooperatives, with the profits shared between the workers. That way any labor-saving techniques would automatically result in higher wages and/or shorter hours. For this to work properly, everybody would have to be guaranteed a job in some business. One way to do that would be to have the government running businesses.

But that's Socialism. We would never accept it here. We can't have people getting something for nothing. That would just make them lazy, and be unfair on hard-working capitalists (who employ others to do the work so they can enjoy their leisure time - a totally different thing!).

That totally misses my point. My point was that you can take all the never generated salaries and the spread them out over a larger population and you don't get to Nirvana. This idea can not be funded just on the unearned salaries.

 

[Leftus]

Agreed. Soon there will be very few jobs for the unskilled. Then one of the few occupations they will be able to do would be crime. So give them a UBI and they will only have to keep themselves occupied and they will be ok.

Then maybe domestic servants may become a thing again. Clean the house, cook the meals everyday and look after the garden. They will be willing to work for minimum wages just for something to do.

Well, I have robots to clean the floors, so that's a job lost. I can't speak highly enough of my Braava mopping bot. Love it. Spilled some coffee? OK Google, have the mop bot clean the kitchen. Done. And iRobot is coming out with a lawn mowing robot, so there is that. So far, no cooking robot that I know of.

 

[Distracted1]

If robots are taking jobs, their wages can be given to us.

My idea for Universal Basic Income (UBI) Funding.

After all, we don't have to pay robots.

Discuss.

If robots take over enough of the labor of maintaining a standard of living, the economy will need to change so much that "wages" and "income" are no longer a part of things.

Things will likely resemble a reversion to some kind of Feudalism or, if we are lucky, something like a Star Trek society without the new worlds and new civilizations.

 

[Modified]

We are nowhere near the upper limit of demand for goods and services, so instead of less employment we'd produce more.

I expect the need for human workers will at some point fall too fast for that to be of any help.

 

[rjh01]

We are nowhere near the upper limit of demand for goods and services, so instead of less employment we'd produce more.

The limit is the amount of non-renewable resources we use. This includes fossil fuels and land.

 

[rockinkt]

No, the products they sell AND make changes to laws as per what I said that you dismissed.

Who designs/makes/repairs/ the robots? Don't they get paid?
Wouldn't it be fair to say that a new industry will take up a lot of the slack?

 

[Trebuchet]

We need a definition of "robot" here. Are they like the fully sentient anthropomorphic ones in Questionable Content, mechanically controlled automatic machinery, or something in between? The former do not exist and may not ever exist. The latter have been around for a century or more. And there are all manner of shades of gray in between.
Are the multiple silicon devices that take what I'm typing, transpose it into ones and zeroes, and send it over some unfathomable web to where some devices at your end turn it back into words, all in a couple of heartbeats, "robots". How about some device in a car factory whose sole function is to perform one spot weld on a chassis and misses if another dumb device stops the chassis two cm short of the normal position?
How about a loom that can create complex patterns when fed punch cards? What about Rosie the Roomba, who is patiently waiting in my dining room for me to press the "clean" button; and is smart enough to tell me to clear the rollers after she's swallowed a cat toy? And find her way to the docking station for a charge, even though she didn't start out there? She's stealing from a virtual army of cleaning ladies!
Do they obey Azimov's laws of robotics? Including the zeroeth one?
Did Ned Ludd have it right? Did Ned Ludd actually exist? Should AI's be able to get patents? Does the world owe May a new body, perhaps with actual naughty bits?

Who the hell knows? And why did the voice of River Song just come out of my pocket alerting me to look at a device in my pocket because it thinks I should know something?

Again, who the hell knows? I am reasonably certain, however, that I have had enough wine for tonight, other than the last 2mm in my glass, and should switch over to water and go read some Pratchett on a device that will let me read it without actually being connected to anything but air and fits in my pocket.

 

[Orphia Nay]

Agreed. Soon there will be very few jobs for the unskilled. Then one of the few occupations they will be able to do would be crime. So give them a UBI and they will only have to keep themselves occupied and they will be ok.

Then maybe domestic servants may become a thing again. Clean the house, cook the meals everyday and look after the garden. They will be willing to work for minimum wages just for something to do.

Why would that necessitate minimum wages?

Isn't a clean home important?

I think perhaps you might mean that minimum wages isn't what is now considered minimum wages.

The whole $60,000 happiness wage figure and all.


This ties in with what stay-at-home parents should earn for their labour.

Well, I have robots to clean the floors, so that's a job lost. I can't speak highly enough of my Braava mopping bot. Love it. Spilled some coffee? OK Google, have the mop bot clean the kitchen. Done. And iRobot is coming out with a lawn mowing robot, so there is that. So far, no cooking robot that I know of.

Thermomix?

Who designs/makes/repairs/ the robots? Don't they get paid?
Wouldn't it be fair to say that a new industry will take up a lot of the slack?

Definitely. Already is. A friend's son studied robotics.

He was too ahead of his time, though. But society is catching up as 3D printing etc becomes more and more available and programmable.

 

[Orphia Nay]

We need a definition of "robot" here. Are they like the fully sentient anthropomorphic ones in Questionable Content, mechanically controlled automatic machinery, or something in between? The former do not exist and may not ever exist. The latter have been around for a century or more. And there are all manner of shades of gray in between.
Are the multiple silicon devices that take what I'm typing, transpose it into ones and zeroes, and send it over some unfathomable web to where some devices at your end turn it back into words, all in a couple of heartbeats, "robots". How about some device in a car factory whose sole function is to perform one spot weld on a chassis and misses if another dumb device stops the chassis two cm short of the normal position?
How about a loom that can create complex patterns when fed punch cards? What about Rosie the Roomba, who is patiently waiting in my dining room for me to press the "clean" button; and is smart enough to tell me to clear the rollers after she's swallowed a cat toy? And find her way to the docking station for a charge, even though she didn't start out there? She's stealing from a virtual army of cleaning ladies!
Do they obey Azimov's laws of robotics? Including the zeroeth one?
Did Ned Ludd have it right? Did Ned Ludd actually exist? Should AI's be able to get patents? Does the world owe May a new body, perhaps with actual naughty bits?

Who the hell knows? And why did the voice of River Song just come out of my pocket alerting me to look at a device in my pocket because it thinks I should know something?

Again, who the hell knows? I am reasonably certain, however, that I have had enough wine for tonight, other than the last 2mm in my glass, and should switch over to water and go read some Pratchett on a device that will let me read it without actually being connected to anything but air and fits in my pocket.

I only get one of those references. Hehe, nice though.

 

[psionl0]

Sorry, I mistook you for Modified.

I don't have an answer. I did think about it.

Basically you can't just tax the bejesus out of robots and use the money for a UBI nor could you force employers to pay high salaries for a short working week. It would make the local product uncompetitive with imports and force local businesses to the wall.

A UBI financed by an equitable tax on all earnings might be made to work if we set the level correctly and if we eliminated other types of social security benefits but we would still need to stop the foreign sector from messing it up (not to mention that the government wouldn't dare to upset the global corporations).

 

[init15jw]

Soon there will be very few jobs for the unskilled.

Until it actually happens, I would not count on the elimination of work as a real problem. Every technological innovation leads us to believe that because certain jobs have been eliminated or reduced, there will be fewer work opportunities. But this has yet to be born out.

The same thinking existed during the industrial revolution, and as computers became widespread. The fact is it's often the thing we fear will eliminate work that actually creates a massive boom.

Despite all the technological efficiency, unemployment was near all-time lows before COVID, so I wouldn't worry about this. If there are robots all over the place there's going to be a ton of robots to sell, upgrade, troubleshoot, and police as they turn bad and try to kill us.

 

[psionl0]

Every technological innovation leads us to believe that because certain jobs have been eliminated or reduced, there will be fewer work opportunities. But this has yet to be born out.

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.

 

[rjh01]

Why would that necessitate minimum wages?

Isn't a clean home important?

I think perhaps you might mean that minimum wages isn't what is now considered minimum wages.

The whole $60,000 happiness wage figure and all.

This ties in with what stay-at-home parents should earn for their labour.

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.

 

[HoverBoarder]

I have listened and read articles from many people who believe that UBI will become required for the operation of the future economy.


I don't have a lot of time to go into it in depth, but basically there are a few main principles.

1) The idea that we would have machines take all of our jobs is just not accurate. Every major increase in human technology period has brought with it new types of jobs in addition to the ones that are lost.

2) Currently there is a hard limit on the jobs that would be profitabely realistic for machines to take. That primary limit is the limit on our current AI to quickly make sense of the general complex world around us. Basically common sense. This puts a limit to mostly narrow "search and find" operations including tumor detection, stock trading, self checkout, manufacturing, etc.

3) Once we pass this point, there will be a mass explosion of new roles involving human/AI interfaces. More than there will be population to fulfill. Efficiency utilization will also require that we reduce unnecessary roles and services, and it will be cheaper and easier to put everyone under a single UBI than all of the countless bureaucracy that we have now with welfare, food stamps, tuition assistance, etc. All of those programs require overhead and waste. Plus with the efficiency increases, especially in reduced supply chain costs, basic staples will be a lot cheaper.


Right now if I had to guess, it wold probably be more expensive to set up a UBI, but it definitely would be more streamlined.

 

[psionl0]

Every major increase in human technology period has brought with it new types of jobs in addition to the ones that are lost.

I just addressed this "argument" in the post above. What is your answer?