Capitol Hill Blue Forums Political Issues Finance, the economy & Economics Universal Basic Income? Guaranteed Job?

We will be forced to adapt to some kind of UBI/JG model no matter what the economic cognoscenti say because technological unemployment is a Pandora's Box which was already opened about a decade or so back.
Artificial intelligence and advanced robotics are here to stay and both fields are advancing faster than the consumer computer revolution did at the turn of the century.

Advanced robotics has already produced a walking bot that has most of the agility of a human body with rapidly advancing material handling capabilities. Boston Dynamics demonstrated a walking bot that can handle slippery steps and can maintain erect balance even when shoved or pushed, so bots no longer fall over or lose their footing on tricky surfaces.

Add in enough AI and it's easy to predict a "Bicentennial Man" model by 2020 or 2022, and five years hence such a device will most likely cost about as much as a luxury SUV.

By 2030 such units will most likely be able to do pretty much any skilled or unskilled labor we do now. Fifteen years is an eternity in the tech field, so don't underestimate this in terms of cost or feasibility. Industry has wanted to rid itself of the human component for as long as industry has existed.
Naturally they never think of the impact on the workforce, because that's "a government problem", right?

Well, here it is, and the small government advocates who worship libertarian tropes about personal responsibility and unregulated capitalism are about to stare down an abyss where no coin drop returns the echo of confirmation, because there is no bottom, and their arguments will be reduced to shouting at the darkness.

Technological unemployment is a threat to capitalism like no other.
It cannot be stopped, or even slowed, and it cannot be reasoned with. It will lay waste to well over half the workforce in the coming decade and possibly 90 percent of it by 2035.

We can ignore it or fight it all we want but there is no turning back. Ignore it at your own peril, because if you train for new vistas in employment you will quickly learn that the lifespan won't even outlive the sell by date on some of the technology you own now.

Fight it, and you're screaming at a tornado.

Rendering half the workforce redundant will trigger either a come to Jesus moment where UBI is the only available solution or it will trigger global revolution and unimaginable slaughter. No class of society will be safe.

Resisting UBI will simply trigger global economic collapse. The elites only get to choose whether it's a rapid collapse or a slow motion one.

UBI will be sold to them as a shareholder dividend. They get to own and manage the wheels of industry, society gets to share in the dividends.

PS: Techological unemployment will also raise, for the final time, questions about who gets to reproduce and why.
Watch for massive pushback from religious types but don't expect Armageddon because the only dividend from that will be a faster road to their own end.

Technological unemployment will force a sharp focus on the whole competition/cooperation paradigm in ways no one could heretofore imagine.

While I don't share Jeff's dire predictions - I think things progress in a nonlinear fashion - his point is well taken. That the economic system will be replaced there is little doubt. That it will need to be more cooperative I also think is inevitable. That social interactions and mores will transform as a result of the above is a certainty.
As the Chinese say: may you live in interesting times!

I think Jeff is more right than wrong in his predictions. In the past doomsday scenarios were spouted about claiming technologies would replace ever more workers. Along came the Luddites to smash the machines but eventually workers found new employment in new and as of yet uninvented areas. So many today claim the same thing will happen and all will be well as humans adapt to their new conditions. And find employment in the evolving work place.

I believe that this time things really are different. As robotics and technologies develop machines that can do ever more tasks better and more efficiently than humans, the only positions left for humans will be to develop better and better machines. And in pure numbers how many people will that employ? Only a small percentage of humans today have the capacity to learn the very difficult high tech skills that will be necessary. Which leads me to the following regarding Tesla’s new Model 3 factory under construction:


Link

And this is just the beginning of what’s in store.

I really like Elon Musk, a lot.

I hope not.

Simple: The citizens of a country should own some percentage of the country's industry. They have been doing that in Alaska for some time now. Some people are not very smart, so you have to prevent them from selling their share. Just tax every company a small percentage of their gross and we have the money to distribute the dividends.

But we do need to do this on a world-wide basis to prevent companies from moving to countries without the tax.

But.. But... PIA what you're suggesting sounds so dangerously close to the S word shhhhh Socialism

I'm not trying to spell out doomsday predictions, this is not an excercise in hyperbole. I'm just sticking my finger in the wind and saying "Chance of showers Thursday, be sure to pack your bumbershoot."

Now, that could go in the direction of a good rainstorm and everyone gets a nice soak, and we have to put up our galoshes and raincoats in the cloakroom or it could go full hurricane and wipe everything out.
That depends on how much we try to resist it.

I agree, Jeff. Like global warming, technological unemployment is an issue that is here, conceivable, and must be dealt with. We can ameliorate its effects, or we can live with the consequences. It may be that these issues are beyond the human scope to correct, but I choose not to believe so.

Our economy is built on a paradigm of employment for wages and consumption of goods. Those constituent parts can be decoupled, at least to a certain extent. We already do so in many aspects of the overall economy: Retirement benefits, Social Security, unemployment compensation and welfare, as well as those who live on investment income. UBI would be an extension of those concepts. Personally, I would orchestrate it as a refundable tax credit. That way it can be phased out for those who do not need it, and it would require participation in the general economic scheme of the nation.

In many respects such a scheme would be nearly revenue neutral, since the dollars spent would recirculate throughout the economy, the Local Multiplier Effect. The only step missing is the actual employment for wage process.

That "minor detail" seems to rankle the congregation quite a bit because they can't seem to accept certain realities and prefer to manufacture their own.
The whole "forty-seven percent" narrative speaks to a form of denial that is well beyond pathological.

Put in perspective, the majority of that so called forty-seven percent once had well paying and secure jobs which placed them in a tax bracket which classified them as legitimate productive members of a capitalist society.
Such persons are reluctant to just toss that off and just become bums for the sheer fun of it, thus their cumulative number represents a fairly looming sector of society that no longer reaps the benefit of what it sows. Indeed, most in that forty-seven percent still work and work hard. They just get paid meager wages now and can't make ends meet.

That must be mighty frightening news, so why not just generate some cover which will divide and conquer instead?