Universal Basic Income again

It may be. It may not be. I haven't said it will be. I have said it could be. It is my interlocutors here who refuse to address the potential situation. It seems to be a strong article of faith on their part that everyone will always be able to get a job and enough work to live on if they just stop being lazy. But it is quite possible that even if they have the best possible work ethic, there may come a time when you can't get the work.

 

I answered that above. It isn't. It is a choice society will make. If your society wants to leave those who work is not available for to die, that's your choice. I would then expect a huge spike in crime in the short term before they die off, and a much smaller population afterwards.

 

I must admit that I share some of your attitude but not many of the specific concerns. I believe that the future is gloomy but for different reasons. I believe that war is in our future. It is my opinion that China and Russia have formed a strategic team. China is keeping Russia afloat by buying her goods, especially oil. They are having major joint military exercises together to prepare for the coming conflict. Russia is using up the west's arsenal of weaponry in Ukraine so there will be less available with which to defend Taiwan. America grows weaker every day. That is all that is keeping China from attacking today. When the Biden administration reaches the end of its tenure, China will strike. Taiwan will disappear. South Korea and parts of Japan will be targeted. Will it turn nuclear? I doubt it. But it will mean the end of America as we have known it.

 

China has waited as long as it has not only because of US military might, but also because China was deadset on 'reuniting' with Taiwan peacefully.

I agree that the weakening west is a factor of why they may attack in the next couple of decades, as is Taiwan's populace's ever decreasing interest in joining with China, but I think the biggest reason is that they are running out of time, as their peak might will be gone in the next couple decades as their demographics age out, and Xi will also be too old to stay in power and will want a big historical win for his legacy.

 

Weird. This comment was originally something different, yes?

I won't respond to what you originally said if you don't want me to

 

You may if you want. I decided to delete that part of the post because we were talking in circles and it was going nowhere.

 

@Fangbeer's response pretty much spelled it out. Just as with animals, mankind evolves. I would imagine that people hundreds of years ago, when faced with newfangled inventions, worried also... yet life continues. If people choose to not evolve and adjust, I can't see why that should be anyone else's responsibility to guarantee them a job, wages or the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed.

 

Evolve is an interesting choice of words here. Evolution isn't voluntary. Evolution is the more suited surviving and the less suited dying out.

If you meant adapt and change, that doesn't address what you quoted in my post. It seems to be an article of faith that work will always be available, enough to get by on, and those who don't get the work must be lazy and unwilling to do it. But if the work doesn't exist, and the resources are horded by others, that is incorrect.

 

Evolve is the right word choice. A person evolves from a basic entry level worker. They grow as a human intellectually, and become more productive. They evolve and accept external conditions that change.

Evolving is voluntary. Those that do not choose to evolve, to grow and yes, adjust, will fail.

 

Those who do attempt to grow and adjust may also fail, and will fail if the opportunities are not there.

 

So once again, the concern is for those who do not evolve, that they be 'guaranteed' employment and enough to support the lifestyle of their choosing?

It's called welfare. are that is not going to be supporting much.

 

It truly amazes me that you read that into what I wrote.

 

I didn't realize we had been talking at all.

I just wanted to work to quell your skepticism that new technology, especially automation, has the potential to create an environment for more new jobs than it replaces.

First, it reduces many of the physical obstacles that block access to employment. There are many tasks that are dangerous, or physically prohibitive for many people to perform. As an example, people might complain that a caterpillar excavator replaces 100 men with shovels. The guy in the caterpillar, however, does not need to be able to use a shovel, will be protected from many of the hazards of repeated shovel use, and gets paid way more than an individual with a shovel. In that same vein of allowing someone to dig without being able to use a shovel, technologies allow people to lift things they cannot lift, access places they cannot access, see things they cannot see, sense things they cannot sense, etc. It gives people the power and ability to do things they could never have done without it. This is especially true for people that would be considered disabled in a world without technologies. Even the mentally disabled.

My wife works with autistic children and adults that struggle with communication. They are generally considered disabled due to these limitations, but advances in technologies have shown that with access to communication tools, that there are beautiful brilliant minds locked up inside there behind barriers that they are physically unable to overcome. The more we improve access and empower individual minds the greater the potential for the advancement of everyone's quality of life. Technologies not only help autistics surmount these barriers, but allows others to surmount their own barriers as well.

Second, the limitations to technologies provide us opportunities for labor in support those limitations. The human mind is an incredibly powerful processor, and the body is an extraordinary input output device. As I type this comment, my active processing is working to communicate with you, but I have hundreds of systems active working to accomplish this goal that I don't have to think about at all. I'm not concerned with which muscles I have to twitch, how hard, or long to twitch them to engage with the keyboard. I'm regulating my body temperature, I'm regulating the CO2 levels in my blood. I'm collecting sensory input about the air currents & noises in the room. I have built in interrupt functions that are actively deciding which information is important and which can be ignored that will disengage me from this typing if my attention needs to be directed elsewhere. This gives me an immense advantage over preprogrammed systems, including AI. AI is terrible at unique situations, human reasoning, risk assessment, & value judgement.. Most importantly humans can behave spontaneously & illogically, and quickly determine whether or not such a reaction is exactly what a situation requires. This makes us HIGHLY competitive with AI systems. There are many things that we will also be able to do better, faster, and smarter as a result.

There are plenty of tales of AI miscalculations that support my opinion. A fish recognition software identified fish by the fingers of the fishermen presenting the fish to the camera. Autonomous driving systems thinking the moon is a yellow light, or that a tractor trailer was a street sign that it could safely drive under. The creativity of AI leads to failures that are very difficult for AI to deduce it made, let alone recover from and correct. These are problems that humans can quickly recognize and adapt to.

Third is the human ability to think laterally and creatively about events they don't actually have to perform in order to determine likely outcomes. Well collect & store all sorts of data about the world that is completely imaginary. AI can't do that. If I ask you what a chair is, you could describe it as something to sit on, draw a stick figure representation of a chair that could never be sat on and that never existed in the real world, I could show you a whole host of non chair objects and you could quickly determine if you could sit on them. AI really struggles with that. AI doesn't know how people's knees bend, how to climb on or off a chair, how to be comfortable in a chair in various situations and environments. It doesn't know when a chair is useful and when it is of little use. It doesn't know if a chair is a appropriate for children or dogs or elderly or that it's something you can stand on to change a light bulb, or put your foot on to tie your shoe, or any of the other million random things you can also do with a chair besides sit in it. It's very difficult to teach AI these things because AI doesn't have a human body to interact with the world. It doesn't know how something makes it feel. It doesn't know how something makes others feel. This type of skill is what allows us to innovate in ways that are not possible for AI. It's the ability to find alternate uses for things, solve problems in new unique ways, and even create new problems to solve that gives us an edge over AI.

These are just some of the reasons that the use of automation and AI creates more things for people to do than jobs it replaces.

 

I get your concern, and it's valid, but you're not the only one that has that concern. Some of those people are job creators. If the labor exists, someone will be motivated to find a good use for it.

Unfortunately humans are fallible. Failure is a fact of life. It's never eliminated from the equation.

 

Are you denying we have a GLUT of jobs out there?

Automation is opening up jobs, BETTER JOBS just as automation has done since the beginning of the industrial age. Do you realize how many jobs were killed when agriculture got automated? How about the telephone system, have any idea how many "operators", the switchboard operators, it took and how all those jobs went away when first mechanical switch which still required lots of maintenance people and then electronic and those jobs went away. Ever see pictures of the HUGE Sears and Roebucks mail and telephone rooms taking in their catalog orders, Amazon has a fraction of that labor force. A young person about to graduate here in my state can go to FREE robotics and automation school for two years and we have employers BEGGING them to come and work for SIX FIGURE starting wages.

In this country it does and the work is widely available. Of course it's not going to come knocking on your door being served up on a silver platter. My first jobs after school was unloading boxcars of lumber in the summer heat and humidity of the deep south, sawing lumber and build apartments, then in the cold of winter on the coast in the shipyard. I moved 1000 miles to Chicago for better opportunity went by all those things I outlined and after an successful career throughout am no comfortably retired.

Of problem is not the income from a job being obtainable, it's income not from a job but from the government being just as obtainable. Why do we need increased immigration if as you say jobs are shrinking?

Well people get jobs and jobs changed and people adapt and the free market when allowed to operate freely sees that available labor and usually comes up with ways to apply it to produce even more value to the economy as has happened throughout the centuries.

I am listening to a news report now about construction contractors are having to turn down jobs because of the LABOR SHORTAGE in their industry. She's reading off the labor reports

Demand for carpenters up 23%, stone masons 45%, construction labors 18%. These are HIGH paying jobs.

 

Our program produces the core credits necessary for an AS in mechatronics in a 1 year certificate program. Another year of gen-ed gets you the AS which turns into a BS if you wish to go further. It doesn't make sense to do that on your own, however, because employers come through our lab begging for people with even just an interest in automated systems that they can help to develop for a diverse number of roles in their manufacturing. They often pay the rest of the way. Many of our graduates are already earning 6 figure incomes. Out of high school. A couple did as I suggested earlier and use the tools of automation to create their own production. One guy makes titanium knives from raw material to shipping box. Another makes custom fireplace grates. Another has a machine repair shop.

 

We have a huge new aluminum rolling mill being built here that will employee 2000+ and they in conjunction with the state industrial developement board are building a 70,000 square foot vocational training center next to the high school where juniors can apply and take courses there half day.

 

Those are jobs that automation and AI are not taking in the foreseeable future.

So yes, we have jobs.