It's so fascinating that physical labor seems to be the main concern when it comes to robots doing it better/cheaper than humans. If anything, we know that automation is coming after office desk jobs first. Those jobs are much easier to automate. Language models can read a manuscript and spit out a summary/judgment with much better my friend that has read so many books and evaluate book projects. The "robot" has read more books, can memorize more of the manuscript as it reads it and does it much much much faster.
Maybe publishing houses are not comfortable replacing her with an AI but it will eventually happen.
We've been automating away office jobs for a lot longer than we've been putting ML in robots to automate factory work, though.
For example, the way business mail used to work was that the bureaucrat in question would record their message onto a tape, and then send that tape off to a special department full of typists to actually turn that voice recording into a letter. That whole concept is not only gone, but it's such a foreign idea that it sounds like something you'd write for a dieselpunk novel. The moment we started putting computers on people's desks, we expected everyone to know how to type. Same thing goes for a lot of other office tasks, which are now comfortably managed by software suites we literally call "Office".
That being said, the new wave of machine-learning powered automation scares me. Not because I'm worried that my job will be taken by software, but because said software will barely work. For factory jobs, the risks are obvious; that's why we put these robots in cages[0]. However, these office jobs are still making critical decisions that will increasingly be handled by automation. We already know how much having to deal with Google sucks; and they are pretty much addicted to automating away all their support staff. In your manuscript example, it could be that the ML model just starts burying specific genres of book or books with specific types of characters in them, for stupid reasons.
[0] Or if you're Amazon, you put the workers in cages, because Dread Pirate Bezos hates them.
> Not because I'm worried that my job will be taken by software, but because said software will barely work.
If said automation works like most corporate initiatives I've been a part of, it'll require 5 employees to implement, update, and maintain for every 1 that it saves, meanwhile costing millions of dollars per year to some vendor for a support license. Some workers might be let go but they were on the chopping block anyway. A few years later the whole thing is scrapped and the cycle starts over again.
<<Not because I'm worried that my job will be taken by software, but because said software will barely work. For factory jobs, the risks are obvious; that's why we put these robots in cages[0]. However, these office jobs are still making critical decisions that will increasingly be handled by automation.
Just to build on this a little. Even if they do work, general population will have little to no understanding on how they work. They will be little black boxes that govern our daily lives with little to no way to correct it if things go awry. As much as I am amazed by what ML can do already, we need some basic customer facing documentation on how it is supposed to work.
I know this is a bit of a low effort argument, but every ML "enhanced" product I use ay my job is a variation on "you entered data xyz - here are some more examples where people entered .xyz. and this is the result they got:..." or "you are entering data at time ab:cd - here is what other people searched for at similar times:...".
“For example, the way business mail used to work was that the bureaucrat in question would record their message onto a tape, and then send that tape off to a special department full of typists to actually turn that voice recording into a letter. That whole concept is not only gone, but it's such a foreign idea that it sounds like something you'd write for a dieselpunk novel. The moment we started putting computers on people's desks, we expected everyone to know how to type.”
It’s true that executives now do their own typing, but that is not automation. It’s actually a rare case of modern work becoming less specialized, with a whole category of highly specialized workers (typists) ceasing to exist.
If the executive uses voice-to-text technology, then that would be a case of automation.
To extend your excellent summary of office automation, you can think of most government functions as a manually operated AI. There are piles of rules and regulations to administer, and that is ripe for automation. However, can you imagine the horror of, say, a machine efficient IRS? The only thing that makes a lot of the regulatory regime survivable is the inefficiency of the bureaucracy. A hyper efficient bureaucracy would be suffocating.
I think you're right about automation coming for office jobs, but it's not that odd that physical labor would be the focus, a couple hundred years ago, like 95% of people worked in agriculture, and automation is the reason only 1% of people do today. It's harder to suss out how many factory jobs have been automated away compared to how many are just being done elsewhere, but a lot of factory labor has been automated as well.
It's almost like automation is coming for office jobs because it already claimed the low-hanging fruit elsewhere.
Human computers were automated by computers and created the programming jobs. But we have many more of those than ever and it seems to increase even more.
There are types of jobs that don’t necessarily get reduced even though productivity is increased.
For example the number of military soldiers is mostly a political decision. Managers, lawyers and other bureaucrats are increasing in numbers and power despite having better educated workers and more sophisticated tools.
The economic and political games we play are not aligning with reducing work time to pre industrial levels. Technological progress cannot be thought of as independent of societal factors.
I think your last assumption is correct. Agriculture, textiles, automobiles, and food production (not restaurants) have all seen significant automation, while office jobs have actually increased.
Very good point, the physical labour we still see has survived 100+ years of attempted automation so is very resilient to it (relatively speaking). Whereas there is still a lot of office works that you can look at and quite easily think "there must be a way for a machine to handle that".
Even before you need language models, though, there's an insane amount of "digital manual labor" that involved people shuttling files around and validating / cross referencing data in ways that would be done far more correctly and efficiently by software. In my opinion, low code tooling threatens many more jobs than AI does in the short term.
This seems like one of those problems where the last 5% is going to take 99% of the effort and time.
A lot of people would be out of jobs if data was truly interchangeable, and there were robust ways of formatting data that would work for everything people wanted to do, and software was bug-free and exported/imported perfectly every time, but... even something "standard" like date/time data is all sorts of hard to have people and their systems actually do correctly in a general way.
This is how competition is snuffed out - the companies that realize this have already completed the switch or have started it and they'll be the ones to outlast all their competitors that have fallen behind with slower processes.
This has been true for as long as people have written software. We eliminate ops with clouds, assembly with compilers, code with libraries, software with SaaS and platforms.
What makes low-code/no-code different from everything else?
What you'll find in a lot of workplaces you can't automate judgement of something like a book, because of the management's ever shifting definition of what they want.
Twilight is a big hit, and suddenly they want a bunch of teen paranormal romance, and it's even fine if it's poorly written by normal standards if it has the right themes. Your AI from before is largely useless.
I disagree on the order of things. Both are equally on the chopping block.
Physical labor has reasons to be focused first compared to office jobs because as a society we've scaled that up far more (more jobs that involve physical labor than office jobs/those that don't), all that physical labor and scale comes at a large cost, and physical labor is at times easier to automate compared to office work. You can decompose the steps of delivering food to a table or lifting a box and dropping it down somewhere else. Naturally, we've converged to optimize for simplicity when it comes to physical labor because people in physical labor don't like wasted effort or operations that change all the time, whereas office jobs can have many conditional branches unpruned.
There are a few publishing companies in NYC that pitch manuscript ideas and ghost writers are hired to write it. Currently a profitable company, only works around cookbooks and logical book ideas that AI could pick up (what's trending on google, etc), but either way it's coming.
Majority of Excel jobs I have seen in regulated industries are because people use the tools that they are familiar with for everything. Do you really need a spreadsheet to generate reports? Project Management Tracking? Timesheets? Task Lists? Calendars and Schedules?
The majority of the jobs people do are updating crap in spreadsheets that don’t need to be there. If it weren’t for SOPs and audits, this stuff could be wiped out easily.
The only protection for these office workers is the status quo and inertia to change. Excel provides some task automation but still requires recurring human input and maintenance. The new wave of AI does NOT.
I dunno, the job of customer service phone rep seems like it should be easy to automate, and they've been attempting to do so for decades, but how many people get absolutely frustrated with such systems?
I interned in sales. One of my jobs was logging into CRM, counting how many people have tasks to do today / tomorrow / overdue.
Count how many deals moved since last day. Count deals value in the basket for specific stages.
It would take me 15 minutes a day, before I spent 15 minutes automating it. I know this is extreme example, but one that happened in my job. That was a startup with some of the best VCs in Europe.
Another international unicorn, had me create a marketing campaign and then copy the data from the marketing software into an excel. Just copy it like date, name of campaign, number of target users.
I guess I spent like 30 minutes a day doing this. Just copying stuff from one web app to a spreadsheet.
Automating customer service is hard, but work is so manual people in the programming field I think have no idea. Also made me unable to work in marketing or sales as I would just want to spend time automating stuff.
Summary maybe, but a judgement I doubt. Your robot would have to be able to address how the book fits into the current zeitgeist which is not something written down. It's ephemeral and intrinsic to the climate of current affairs, pop culture and most challenging, how people actually feel about the combination of all those facts.
Humans can fail to grasp all that too, but I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of culture and it's tendency to change rapidly.
Agree. Robotics get the bad rap because it can physically be pointed at vs. an AI in the cloud. Robots mostly take redundant physical labor whereas software is taking the cush jobs away.
This story has stuck with me since I read it many years back. And then seeing it come to life in so many ways where machines are "optimizing" processes and workflows for humans is scary.
I’ve been watching a lot of factory tour videos (most are in China) on YouTube. Especially the electronics kind. I notice that the ones pre-2015 are full of humans and now it’s a lot more machines.
On one hand, automation will help bring back manufacturing competitiveness in the West because the capital expenditure is going down (a dobot mg400 which is ~$4k) and labour is essentially $0. On the other hand, what will happen to all the low cost labour in the developing nations? Such as the migrant workers in China?
Forget about here in North America where UBI is a possibility - I think we can agree UBI is not possible in low income countries.
One thing about all this is that Trades or service jobs such as salons - I don’t see that being automated anytime soon.
Btw whenever the topic of Amazon workers comes up I think about the movie Nomadland. Check it out if you haven’t watched it yet.
> I think we can agree UBI is not possible in low income countries
No, we won't agree. Any country can tax its industry (GDP) by certain percentage and redistribute this among its population as an UBI. It might not sustain you, but it is a form of universal dividend.
The actual percentage is only a matter of political choice. I don't think any country (unless there is like a disastrous famine, and even most famines today are actually redistribution problems in disguise) can really say that redistributing 100% of its GDP would not be able to sustain its population. So there must exist a lower percentage from which this is possible.
I wish modern Western economies would have the guts to do this with about 20% of their GDP. Economic history shows that (especially progressive) taxation actually matters very little when it comes to economic growth.
> I wish modern Western economies would have the guts to do this with about 20% of their GDP. Economic history shows that (especially progressive) taxation actually matters very little when it comes to economic growth.
UBI is much more than just taxation - a UBI at 20% of GDP would almost certainly cause massive inflation. That's ~$10000 per person per year in the US.
And that's not to mention that a 20% UBI would have to be on top of already existing government spending to maintain infrastructure and services. If it replaced social benefits in the US, it'd add an extra trillion or two to the federal budget (already 25% of GDP!) depending on which services you allowed it to replace.
The simple answer to all these questions of "what will happen to people currently working in industry X or job Y" is – they will retire, and won't be replaced. Those studying or entering the workforce will see the reduced opportunities and pursue other career paths.
Automation isn't going to happen overnight. It is a generational change.
> I think we can agree UBI is not possible in low income countries.
This got me wondering, what is the best analysis of whether UBI is feasible economically for a given country? How low is too low? Does it boil down to something like the difference between average per capita income and average per capita GDP? Or something else; is it possible to afford UBI even if GDP is lower than personal income?
Basic income works from parents to children, for example trust funds. Sometimes it’s expanded to families, for example emirates in UAE. The next level is small countries with large sovereign wealth funds. Of course family seems to lose its meaning once you have 7 billion family members.
re: dobot, that's an impressive robot arm, and it's even cheaper than what you cited! ($2700 on the product page)
My first thought is why don't we see more food automation? ex. retrofitting these in a mcdonalds kitchen should be in the realm of possibility. Food is my largest expense behind rent and taxes, I imagine the same is true for most.
The fidelity and affordability of these machines has definitely taken a huge leap forward in the past few years. Many will echo "the technology isn't there yet", but it certainly feels like we're on the cusp of full robo revolution. Excited to see how far this will go by 2030.
I thought this was an interesting insight into what a fully-automated grocery store looks like. And also wild to think about how different things are when you design them for automation from the ground up.
I wonder how much of a McDonald’s costs are staff. If most of the cost of a cheeseburger is food costs plus stuff like real estate then it might not make sense to replace the people with robots, especially once you account for needing a few humans to manage the place and maintenance (plus accounting for downtime when stuff breaks).
Yea lots of desktop class industrial arms available in next few years! The mg400 seems like the best value with industrial (rather than educational) in mind.
I’ve been looking at the Epson Scara arms but those go for like 10k I can’t afford it lol.
Yea I see a lot of small startup types but no big chains like macdonalds, even with a POC to fully automate! Surprised Uber Eats isn’t in on it with their ghost kitchens and autonomous car endeavours.
The main ones that seem to be lowest hanging fruit are coffee, pizza, and stir fry.
Also, sushi/maki machines have been widely used for a long time!
I think its 5-10 years before complete automation. We are seeing more partial automation, such as a deep fryer that will automatically lower/raise the fryer basket, and being able to order without needing waitstaff to take the order.
The main part holding it back now is not the capital cost of the equipment, its the NRE (non-recurring engineering) costs in making all of the equipment operate together as there is not a standard platform to make various pieces of equipment easy to plug together.
What a boon for small businesses. Standing at a punch press is not only tedious but can be dangerous work. That person who did that could spend their time inspecting the stamped parts, loading the material and supervising the robot instead of wearing themselves out doing a repetitive task. Automation doesn't have to replace the complete manufacturing process, just the easy parts.
>> That person who did that could spend their time inspecting the stamped parts, loading the material and supervising the robot instead of wearing themselves out doing a repetitive task. Automation doesn't have to replace the complete manufacturing process, just the easy parts.
Automation always reduces labor costs. If the company wants to spend the savings on a human doing something else that's an option, but the notion that automation creates more jobs is false.
> the notion that automation creates more jobs is false
This is true in the first-order analysis but history has shown that people with free time will find a way to use their newfound time to create new industry. It wasn't all that long ago that >50% of people were farmers. We don't have 50% unemployment now that we have mega-combines and all the other machinery that has made it so <1% of people need to farm. We won't have 50% unemployment when the robots come to do factory jobs and drive trucks.
I am an accountant. Automation is for sure coming for a lot of my jobs. What I have seen is that automation guts out the middling jobs. So, you still need data entry clerks, and you still need "strategy" type roles. But the middle ground are the ones that go, or rather, you don't recruit for those roles. The machines get them.
It is honestly the same in tech. The idea/product guy is still there and so are the people piecing it together. But the people in the middle: task masters, documentation writers, manual testers, etc are always being automated away.
The middle jobs are under attack.
Future jobs will just be feeding the AI til it no longer needs us.
Some people point many factors as a "need" for basic income. Automation is one of them. Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit only its owners.
I donno, we already have automation doing a lot of things today. Lack of work is only due to lack of imagination and tools like this make us more capable than ever.
The universe is infinitely complex and large, there is plenty for people to do.
How so? It seems one needs capital to start new things, time to use their imagination (as opposed to seeking necessities), and then customers able to pay for whatever the new thing is. I think there are tons of constraints in feasibility.
I conceptualize a UBI as a dividend, where every citizen has exactly one nontransferable ownership share of the nation state and has the right to share in it's profit.
You can get that today by simply buying into one of the many low cost ETFs available following the S&P500 index. No need to wait for the State to do it for you.
I conceptualize it as a cryptocurrency w/ single identity, a max wallet amount (10 million perhaps -the rest is taxed 100%), and a utilization score...basically where those who make more transactions and hold less in their wallet get more UBI paid into it... then there just needs to be a mechanism to make the coin 'stable' to where 1 coin is about a loaf of bread... it'd need to maybe have separate account types though and gets a little murky around how businesses accept the coin.... and how that plays into the max-limit (goal being to limit inequality..and basically have a max un-equalness, where you've essentially "won the monopoly game" and now you can go out and help others win too...).
This would be a plausible argument if automation of farming agriculture resulted in 90% of the population being destitute (the vast majority of humans used to work in agri). On the contrary, extreme poverty is at the lowest level ever since agricultural automation was introduced.
So, I don't buy this argument. Huge, society changing automation has happened already. We didn't need UBI, and people were lifted out of poverty in huge numbers.
This time around, factory and transporation automation will drive the price of commodity goods like food and electronics to just above the cost to create them. After we have an end-to-end automated food production line (from farms, to trucks, to warehouses, to supermarkets, to homes) then the price of food will be so cheap that it's almost free.
That's aside from the fact that UBI is not possible economically (it would plunge the disabled into poverty by reducing their welfare, as well as tank the entire government budget). Most UBI proposals would cost in excess of 100% of the US government budget. Which means, no more healthcare, no more roads, no more firefighters.
> Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit only its owners.
The way tech has been heading I'm guessing robots will primarily benefit the manufacturers. Sure, the wealthy will be able to afford to replace workers with machines and use robots for domestic labor, but the entire time those devices will be spying on their "owners" and reporting everything back to the manufacturers and the state. All of that data will be used by companies to make themselves richer at every opportunity and used by the state to keep uppity citizens in line or discredit them before they can threaten the establishment.
I can't say if we'll need basic income or if such a scheme would work (I'd like to see even one example of it working in a society somewhere) but no mater what it means for the workforce I'd be willing to bet the future of automation is going to enrich a very small number of people at the expense of the vast majority
> Without basic income, robots (as an analogy for automation) will benefit only its owners.
With basic income, that's still true.
With fair (rather than preferentially lower) taxes on capital income, that potentially changes, whether or not you have basic income; funding BI with it is just a way of making sure that the taxation isn't redirected back to benefit the same elites.
How does the economics look for that? It would seem many would be disincentivized to work, which would raise wages in order to attract work, which would make the basic income worth less.
>It would seem many would be disincentivized to work
If you want Netflix, eating out at a restaurant, playing Games or any sort of entertainment? If you want a life, you need to work. There is nothing disincentivized against work unless those people want to live like zombies.
Wages would presumably raise prices only in industries that can't be heavily automated. As a result, industries that are automatible will have lower prices, while industries that require human labor will have inflated prices. In the end, those who make close to minimum wage are probably better off, since they can afford more of the automated things, and those who automate things are probably better off since they have more people to sell to. Those who are well off but don't automate things will probably be about even, since they'll need to pay more for human labor, but will receive UBI and automation benefits.
Compared to means-tested aid with duplicative bureaucracy to that which already exists for income taxation? Depends on a number of factors, including whether you find it by closing the gap between labor and non-labor taxes so that you aren't punishing people for hiring, whether and how you adjust minimum wage in light of it, how you set the level of basic income relative to productive capacity, whether you index it to a revenue stream divided among the eligible population, or target a constant real income level, or set the level by some other means, etc.
Lots of comments, as usual for this topic, suffering from what I call "The broken glazier fallacy".
In "the broken glass fallacy", windows are smashed. In "the broken glazier fallacy", it's the glaziers who essentially have their arms broken (or at least, their modern tools are confiscated).
Automation does not harm the economy or populace at large.
The issue is not automation, but the *speed* of automation.
We just need to create new jobs faster than we displace then.
Readit News
Maybe publishing houses are not comfortable replacing her with an AI but it will eventually happen.
For example, the way business mail used to work was that the bureaucrat in question would record their message onto a tape, and then send that tape off to a special department full of typists to actually turn that voice recording into a letter. That whole concept is not only gone, but it's such a foreign idea that it sounds like something you'd write for a dieselpunk novel. The moment we started putting computers on people's desks, we expected everyone to know how to type. Same thing goes for a lot of other office tasks, which are now comfortably managed by software suites we literally call "Office".
That being said, the new wave of machine-learning powered automation scares me. Not because I'm worried that my job will be taken by software, but because said software will barely work. For factory jobs, the risks are obvious; that's why we put these robots in cages[0]. However, these office jobs are still making critical decisions that will increasingly be handled by automation. We already know how much having to deal with Google sucks; and they are pretty much addicted to automating away all their support staff. In your manuscript example, it could be that the ML model just starts burying specific genres of book or books with specific types of characters in them, for stupid reasons.
[0] Or if you're Amazon, you put the workers in cages, because Dread Pirate Bezos hates them.
If said automation works like most corporate initiatives I've been a part of, it'll require 5 employees to implement, update, and maintain for every 1 that it saves, meanwhile costing millions of dollars per year to some vendor for a support license. Some workers might be let go but they were on the chopping block anyway. A few years later the whole thing is scrapped and the cycle starts over again.
Just to build on this a little. Even if they do work, general population will have little to no understanding on how they work. They will be little black boxes that govern our daily lives with little to no way to correct it if things go awry. As much as I am amazed by what ML can do already, we need some basic customer facing documentation on how it is supposed to work.
Always useless.
“For example, the way business mail used to work was that the bureaucrat in question would record their message onto a tape, and then send that tape off to a special department full of typists to actually turn that voice recording into a letter. That whole concept is not only gone, but it's such a foreign idea that it sounds like something you'd write for a dieselpunk novel. The moment we started putting computers on people's desks, we expected everyone to know how to type.”
It’s true that executives now do their own typing, but that is not automation. It’s actually a rare case of modern work becoming less specialized, with a whole category of highly specialized workers (typists) ceasing to exist.
If the executive uses voice-to-text technology, then that would be a case of automation.
That's worth at least 100 votes!
To extend your excellent summary of office automation, you can think of most government functions as a manually operated AI. There are piles of rules and regulations to administer, and that is ripe for automation. However, can you imagine the horror of, say, a machine efficient IRS? The only thing that makes a lot of the regulatory regime survivable is the inefficiency of the bureaucracy. A hyper efficient bureaucracy would be suffocating.
You should look up how the Harry Potter ride at Universal Studios works.
It's almost like automation is coming for office jobs because it already claimed the low-hanging fruit elsewhere.
There are types of jobs that don’t necessarily get reduced even though productivity is increased.
For example the number of military soldiers is mostly a political decision. Managers, lawyers and other bureaucrats are increasing in numbers and power despite having better educated workers and more sophisticated tools.
The economic and political games we play are not aligning with reducing work time to pre industrial levels. Technological progress cannot be thought of as independent of societal factors.
Even before you need language models, though, there's an insane amount of "digital manual labor" that involved people shuttling files around and validating / cross referencing data in ways that would be done far more correctly and efficiently by software. In my opinion, low code tooling threatens many more jobs than AI does in the short term.
A lot of people would be out of jobs if data was truly interchangeable, and there were robust ways of formatting data that would work for everything people wanted to do, and software was bug-free and exported/imported perfectly every time, but... even something "standard" like date/time data is all sorts of hard to have people and their systems actually do correctly in a general way.
What makes low-code/no-code different from everything else?
THIS 100%!
Twilight is a big hit, and suddenly they want a bunch of teen paranormal romance, and it's even fine if it's poorly written by normal standards if it has the right themes. Your AI from before is largely useless.
Physical labor has reasons to be focused first compared to office jobs because as a society we've scaled that up far more (more jobs that involve physical labor than office jobs/those that don't), all that physical labor and scale comes at a large cost, and physical labor is at times easier to automate compared to office work. You can decompose the steps of delivering food to a table or lifting a box and dropping it down somewhere else. Naturally, we've converged to optimize for simplicity when it comes to physical labor because people in physical labor don't like wasted effort or operations that change all the time, whereas office jobs can have many conditional branches unpruned.
https://www.nber.org/papers/w28061
Excel is a great example of how new technology created more jobs than it destroyed.
The majority of the jobs people do are updating crap in spreadsheets that don’t need to be there. If it weren’t for SOPs and audits, this stuff could be wiped out easily.
The only protection for these office workers is the status quo and inertia to change. Excel provides some task automation but still requires recurring human input and maintenance. The new wave of AI does NOT.
Count how many deals moved since last day. Count deals value in the basket for specific stages.
It would take me 15 minutes a day, before I spent 15 minutes automating it. I know this is extreme example, but one that happened in my job. That was a startup with some of the best VCs in Europe.
Another international unicorn, had me create a marketing campaign and then copy the data from the marketing software into an excel. Just copy it like date, name of campaign, number of target users.
I guess I spent like 30 minutes a day doing this. Just copying stuff from one web app to a spreadsheet.
Automating customer service is hard, but work is so manual people in the programming field I think have no idea. Also made me unable to work in marketing or sales as I would just want to spend time automating stuff.
Humans can fail to grasp all that too, but I think you vastly underestimate the complexity of culture and it's tendency to change rapidly.
I would like to hear peoples' experiences with taking non-programming jobs and automating them.
This automation is not new.
They were eventually replaced with ... computers.
On one hand, automation will help bring back manufacturing competitiveness in the West because the capital expenditure is going down (a dobot mg400 which is ~$4k) and labour is essentially $0. On the other hand, what will happen to all the low cost labour in the developing nations? Such as the migrant workers in China?
Forget about here in North America where UBI is a possibility - I think we can agree UBI is not possible in low income countries.
One thing about all this is that Trades or service jobs such as salons - I don’t see that being automated anytime soon.
Btw whenever the topic of Amazon workers comes up I think about the movie Nomadland. Check it out if you haven’t watched it yet.
No, we won't agree. Any country can tax its industry (GDP) by certain percentage and redistribute this among its population as an UBI. It might not sustain you, but it is a form of universal dividend.
The actual percentage is only a matter of political choice. I don't think any country (unless there is like a disastrous famine, and even most famines today are actually redistribution problems in disguise) can really say that redistributing 100% of its GDP would not be able to sustain its population. So there must exist a lower percentage from which this is possible.
I wish modern Western economies would have the guts to do this with about 20% of their GDP. Economic history shows that (especially progressive) taxation actually matters very little when it comes to economic growth.
UBI is much more than just taxation - a UBI at 20% of GDP would almost certainly cause massive inflation. That's ~$10000 per person per year in the US.
And that's not to mention that a 20% UBI would have to be on top of already existing government spending to maintain infrastructure and services. If it replaced social benefits in the US, it'd add an extra trillion or two to the federal budget (already 25% of GDP!) depending on which services you allowed it to replace.
Automation isn't going to happen overnight. It is a generational change.
This got me wondering, what is the best analysis of whether UBI is feasible economically for a given country? How low is too low? Does it boil down to something like the difference between average per capita income and average per capita GDP? Or something else; is it possible to afford UBI even if GDP is lower than personal income?
My first thought is why don't we see more food automation? ex. retrofitting these in a mcdonalds kitchen should be in the realm of possibility. Food is my largest expense behind rent and taxes, I imagine the same is true for most.
The fidelity and affordability of these machines has definitely taken a huge leap forward in the past few years. Many will echo "the technology isn't there yet", but it certainly feels like we're on the cusp of full robo revolution. Excited to see how far this will go by 2030.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssZ_8cqfBlE
I’ve been looking at the Epson Scara arms but those go for like 10k I can’t afford it lol.
Yea I see a lot of small startup types but no big chains like macdonalds, even with a POC to fully automate! Surprised Uber Eats isn’t in on it with their ghost kitchens and autonomous car endeavours.
The main ones that seem to be lowest hanging fruit are coffee, pizza, and stir fry.
Also, sushi/maki machines have been widely used for a long time!
The main part holding it back now is not the capital cost of the equipment, its the NRE (non-recurring engineering) costs in making all of the equipment operate together as there is not a standard platform to make various pieces of equipment easy to plug together.
Automation always reduces labor costs. If the company wants to spend the savings on a human doing something else that's an option, but the notion that automation creates more jobs is false.
This is true in the first-order analysis but history has shown that people with free time will find a way to use their newfound time to create new industry. It wasn't all that long ago that >50% of people were farmers. We don't have 50% unemployment now that we have mega-combines and all the other machinery that has made it so <1% of people need to farm. We won't have 50% unemployment when the robots come to do factory jobs and drive trucks.
The middle jobs are under attack. Future jobs will just be feeding the AI til it no longer needs us.
The universe is infinitely complex and large, there is plenty for people to do.
How so? It seems one needs capital to start new things, time to use their imagination (as opposed to seeking necessities), and then customers able to pay for whatever the new thing is. I think there are tons of constraints in feasibility.
So, I don't buy this argument. Huge, society changing automation has happened already. We didn't need UBI, and people were lifted out of poverty in huge numbers.
This time around, factory and transporation automation will drive the price of commodity goods like food and electronics to just above the cost to create them. After we have an end-to-end automated food production line (from farms, to trucks, to warehouses, to supermarkets, to homes) then the price of food will be so cheap that it's almost free.
That's aside from the fact that UBI is not possible economically (it would plunge the disabled into poverty by reducing their welfare, as well as tank the entire government budget). Most UBI proposals would cost in excess of 100% of the US government budget. Which means, no more healthcare, no more roads, no more firefighters.
The way tech has been heading I'm guessing robots will primarily benefit the manufacturers. Sure, the wealthy will be able to afford to replace workers with machines and use robots for domestic labor, but the entire time those devices will be spying on their "owners" and reporting everything back to the manufacturers and the state. All of that data will be used by companies to make themselves richer at every opportunity and used by the state to keep uppity citizens in line or discredit them before they can threaten the establishment.
I can't say if we'll need basic income or if such a scheme would work (I'd like to see even one example of it working in a society somewhere) but no mater what it means for the workforce I'd be willing to bet the future of automation is going to enrich a very small number of people at the expense of the vast majority
With basic income, that's still true.
With fair (rather than preferentially lower) taxes on capital income, that potentially changes, whether or not you have basic income; funding BI with it is just a way of making sure that the taxation isn't redirected back to benefit the same elites.
If you want Netflix, eating out at a restaurant, playing Games or any sort of entertainment? If you want a life, you need to work. There is nothing disincentivized against work unless those people want to live like zombies.
Compared to means-tested aid with duplicative bureaucracy to that which already exists for income taxation? Depends on a number of factors, including whether you find it by closing the gap between labor and non-labor taxes so that you aren't punishing people for hiring, whether and how you adjust minimum wage in light of it, how you set the level of basic income relative to productive capacity, whether you index it to a revenue stream divided among the eligible population, or target a constant real income level, or set the level by some other means, etc.
https://marshallbrain.com/manna1
In "the broken glass fallacy", windows are smashed. In "the broken glazier fallacy", it's the glaziers who essentially have their arms broken (or at least, their modern tools are confiscated).
Automation does not harm the economy or populace at large.
The issue is not automation, but the *speed* of automation.
We just need to create new jobs faster than we displace then.