Come here to discuss the political implications of the fast approaching future.
Starter topic for today:
UBI or Universal Basic Income is a proposed solution to mass unemployment forseen in the near future if automation improves as it has been from the time of the industrial revolution. Under a system of UBI everyone recieves a fixed wage from the government periodically simply for existing. Most forms of UBI proposed are meant to be a minimum required to live.
In the event that automation does overtake most simple jobs, what is your opinion on UBI and automation in general? What kind of economic impact would it have to have so many people on welfare and goverment relief? Do you think automation will ever reach such a point where UBI is actually necessary? What about a service economy? Do you think such a thing is viable?
I don't think it would ever work at all but that's just me.
Blake Allen
ubi will be problematic people need purpose these threads are great because we can come up with interesting questions
Luke Nelson
it's most of us, but we're the silent majority in threads like this
Gavin James
>In the event that automation does overtake most simple jobs, what is your opinion on UBI and automation in general? What kind of economic impact would it have to have so many people on welfare and goverment relief? Do you think automation will ever reach such a point where UBI is actually necessary? What about a service economy? Do you think such a thing is viable?
I am convinced that the economy should be decentralized, giving the power into the hands of a few mostly anonymous people makes the people very vulnerable.
At some point, we should balance efficiency for safety. Just because having only ONE megafactory is the most efficient doesn't mean it's necessarily the best for the people.
Isaiah Martinez
I agree, which is why I think mass automation will be a good thing if coupled wih a service economy. The social interaction will build community along lines of economy and a fellowship of merchants miht be forged. Although I do believe in growing pains, I think we'll come out of it better off than before. People will be much more useful and productive after mass automation. But I'm no expert of human behavior.
Nicholas Johnson
UBI cannot work. Assuming a more or less "free" market all it would do is inflate prices so a loaf of bread would cost 20$ rather than 5$. Attempts by the government to price fixing to solve that problem would usher the country into a downward spiral of supply shortages and misery. And that's not even starting on how detrimental UBI is for societal coordination.
With regards to automation, I can only speak for myself here, but I left a 5yo career in hotel business to recycle myself as an IT guy because I can see where things are going and I want to be there. Maybe others should consider that?
Colton Taylor
That's an interesting idea. How do you go about an orderly decentralization of an economy without mass wealth redistribution? I could see an economy decentralized in the sense of cryptocurrency or with less government oversight but what you're talking about is the means of production. I'd really like an elaboration on your idea, as old economic ideas are certainly failing to keep up with the continuation of industrialization. Any new economic ideas are very much appreciated.
>UBI >Because welfare has such a good track record for the past 3 millenia we might as well give it for no reason now
You should gas yourself.
Luke Reyes
There is no future to look forward to.
As the influx of third worlders into first world countries increases, so does the applicants for welfare, as unemployment and taxes that the working class are burdened with until a major societal collapse in which the immigrants take over and destroy our countries like they did their's.
We will descend into anarchy and lastly extinction
Adam Clark
I guess I would be in favor of local businesses getting more business, but I don't know what you should do exactly to help such a trend.
Lincoln Price
Reduce taxes so people with money have more money to spend.
Haha this is turning out to be much more one sided than I had hoped. It seems that everyone can tell that UBI would cause soviet level economic problems. Well, in that case let's focus on the automation side of it.
Firstly; automation may drive down the price of goods. The scale on which they could be profitable produced and tranceported will increase with lower costs for production and tranceportation. How do you think such abundance will effect the market for physical goods in general? Furthermore, there may soon be more virtual substitues for traditionally human professions such as paralegal or diagnostic physician. What effect would this have in a world where low skill jobs have also been cut out of the equation? Do you think that artificial general intelligence is possible? How will that effect the work force?
Christopher Scott
Calm down my gypsy friend. I'm against UBI for the same reasons you are, but I wanted to have a civil discussion of the general implications of it.
Dylan Scott
General Implications are that people that people are lazy and stupid and giving them shit for nothing is like basically removing any ability of people to do something. Might as well just pump em full of heroin, they would be just as useful.
Christian Nguyen
Well this brings up the idea of a service economy. One in which most people provide specific services to their local area based on the local demand. Service industry jobs don't scale up very well. You may be able to build 10000 cars to supply a whole reigon at a single factory but you need 100 restaurants to do the same thing with food. Under this model of a localized service economy, large firms can provide physical goods while local firms provide services that can range from cafes and dining to the most obscure marketable demand such as ubderwater basket weaving classes. This combined with the lower cost of production of the necessites of life would make such a model seem viable. But I'm not an economist. I just like the idea. As less people are needed to keep everyone alive, the general public becomes more and more specialized, and the necessities of life become more and more affordable. I believe that with vertical farming and automation, we'll soon see a day when food is so cheap to produce that it's not even worth selling in anything but huge bulk shipments.
Christopher Anderson
>Wouldn't a Basic Income just lead to higher prices?
I'm not so sure as your not printing more money, you are just redistributing wealth.
We should make heroin legal tвh and just let people be responsible for their own mistakes. I dont believe that the state should own people's lives. If the addicts get too rowdy you can always just kick them out of society or put them down, but for the most part, if you give people the ability to still work to pay for heroin they'll ne even more productive due to addiction. Alcohol and tobacco are highly addictive as well but they aren't as big of a problem. When we outlawed alcohol in the US we saw the same organized crime that you see with the drug trade today. If you legitimize these organizations then you can have more control over their effect on society. And if someone wants to drink themself to death, it's up to their friends and family to stop them, not the state. It's only when you're a danger to others that the state should get involved.
Jeremiah Bennett
How do you even pay for UBI?
Leo King
Not to mention the benefits of having streamlined the entire welfare state.
Colton Jackson
Well then you're just stealing and all the people who aren't tax burdens will just leave or try to overthrow the government.
Ethan Morales
Interesting. As long as people appreciate each other for the services this sounds very good. People have become distrustful because sometimes it makes the impression like you're trying to scratch together the scrabs when you're "out" of most of the material processing (which would have given you a guaranteed income by its nature).
The thing about the food isn't away very far even: What you said is already true for most of the grains, they are in fact counted in bulk and the prices are not very high. For example, a pound of corn is worth 7.1 cents today.
Charles Powell
With taxes. The majority of the money would come from replacing existing welfare structures like unemployment insurance, social security, etc.
Easton Cooper
>mass unemployment from automation >people vote in some dumbfuck socialists >severely limit the amount of hours you're allowed to work to create more jobs >entire business world goes underground overnight >people crafting alibis and dodging CCTVs just to get to work >government loses all income >super shady corporations take their place just need some drugs and neon colors and it'll be the future we all dreamed of
Ryan Brooks
How is that any different from our current welfare system? With UBI we would be getting rid of payroll taxes/social security, unemployment insurance, food stamps, etc.
Joshua Rogers
you retards. Communism couldn't work which forces people to work atleast. How in the ever living hell do you expect giving people money for free will work?
Jack Jackson
So you give people enough to live on and then because you are doing that you have to hike taxes across the board thus making everything more expensive. I'm no economist but wouldn't that devalue the currency seeing as employers would try and either maintain wages at the rates they are now or keep them as low as possible while at the same time the government has to pay out for every child that falls out of someones vagina and every immigrant that gets citizenship?
Camden Jones
>How is that any different from our current welfare system?
The only difference is that today, this type of welfare system is used by a small minority of people. In essence, the payment for nothing is already a joke today, people that live side by side with the leeches of this are already pretty pissed off about it. Most people don't really notice though since it's a shared tax burden.
> With UBI we would be getting rid of payroll taxes/social security, unemployment insurance, food stamps, etc. You probably wouldn't, because you can't let people die due to bad decisions. Social security is a safety net.
Samuel Lopez
Evil bastard.
Brayden Gonzalez
The UBI would probably be at poverty level. I would argue that most people would not be content with having income at the poverty level.
Brandon Garcia
I didn't say the current system wasn't also stealing.
Kayden Bell
I propose we round up all liberals and send them to camp. That will open up 50% of the jobs in the nation, secure prosperity, lower the national debt, end moat crime, and make America a better place.
Jace Wilson
Corporations would get so much profit from automation that they could afford to be taxed and the owners would still have tremendous wealth.
Aaron Cruz
Read the whole thread. Nobody here is in favor of UBI.
Jonathan Brooks
I'm in favor of it. Speak for yourself you scared shitless of progress moron.
Zachary Lopez
You're wrong about that, unfortunately.
Wyatt Ross
You can't say that for sure. That depends on the degree and cost of automation. Not to mention the demand for product. You can't just force wealth redistribution. It almost always end poorly. Study ancient rome from 100BC to 50AD
Samuel Collins
You're right it is, but with the prospects of mass unemployment stemming from the rapid increase in automation, it might be the best solution to have a more effective, streamlined welfare state.
While the new jobs will most likely be created and people will change their education priorities accordingly, the question is how long will a process like that take and what will happen to the displaced people in the mean time?
If a large number of people lack the necessary skills required for these new jobs and can't afford the retraining necessary, how will they survive?
Jackson Barnes
I mean, once we have AI that can do literally every job, why even have billions of humans? What can a human do that an AI can't? Enjoy videogames and other hedonistic degeneracy? Gas them all. Let our AI superintelligence go on to mingle with all the other alien superAI as humanity's legacy.
Dominic Parker
I'm not afirad of progress. We just have different definitions of progress. Your definition involves the decoupling of economic survival with economic participation. That's fairly regressive in my opinion. You would decentivize all of the activities that lead to civilization. A welfare state is not the answer, just as it wasn't the answer 100 years ago. The answer is greater specialization and better education to open new jobs and create new industries.
Elijah Williams
It's already almost impossible to starve to death in the united states as it is. I wholeheartedly reccomend that you do nothing to help the process along. Any comfort you give incentivises a slow transition. Sometimes the situation must be dire.
Sebastian King
Why? Living on $12,000 a year leads to a relatively low quality of life? Some people would settle for this, but I think the majority would not, demonstrated by the fact that most people strive for jobs that earn much more than that.
Christopher Long
Well when everyone is a leech to some degree or another, there goes a lot of that social animosity.
>You probably wouldn't, because you can't let people die due to bad decisions. Social security is a safety net.
UBI becomes that new safety net.
Logan Brown
Automation is cancer. It makes us weak, spiritually and physically.
The labour camp is more virtuous than a fully automated society. The dictator is a saint compared to the AI dependant masses.
Christian Gray
The problem is that there are a multitude of government impediments that will make the transition period extremely hard as it is. Without removing those first, the problem is going to be exacerbated exponentially.
Jack Nguyen
Automation would counteract that by making goods really cheap
Luis Bennett
if cheaps are extremely cheap, you could afford them doing almost nothing. Most people should be able to do almost nothing
Gavin Lewis
Assuming the government will allow market forces to work unimpeded, and allow prices to fall. Unlikely, given the Fed's target inflation rate.
Joshua Hall
goods*
Levi Cox
people starving because of mass unemployment would overthrow the government first
Landon Martinez
There's a problem in the US right now with underachieving. In schools are children underachieve. At work our workers underachieve. The culture of apathy and mediocrity are present in TODAY'S society. The system you propose makes it even easier to eke out a mediocre life at the expense of another. I understand your compassion and pragmatism. You're building a system based on the physical needs of the populace and that's good. But you have to understand that not everyone's needs can or even should be met. There have to be consequences for failure if you plan to deter people from failing.
Carson Torres
I want a New Man, and a New World. This End of History is an ugly wheel that shouldn't simply be turned, it should be broken.
Austin Bennett
Sup Forums has a weird obsession with Survival Of The Fitness without enough self-awareness that in such a world half the people who preach it wouldn't even survive, they'd be quickly overtaken by another.
UBI is not only the future, but the only way we can advance as a species.
Tyler Davis
I agree with this to a degree. It's not the government's job to protect people's lives from their own indecision in the face of a shifting world order. It should only protect their freedom of choice. Not insulate them from the consequences of those choices. So the government should not impede any attempts to lay off workers for the sake of efficiency. Let each firm perform to the greatest of it's ability. Each adult is responsible for their own life.
Dominic Butler
Think of it this way. You have 3 employees that make $20,000 a year, costing you $60,000 but making you 70,000 and netting you $10,000 in profit. you really only need 1 employee if you replace the other 2 with robots, but you keep the others because they have no other way to support themselves. With UBI you can fire the other 2, saving 40,000 in labor costs, pay 10,000 in replacement robots, and have to pay 24,000 in tax for their UBI since UBI is 12,000 a year. The first year you still make 10,000 in profit, but every year after you only need to pay 24,000 UBI tax, netting you a total of 26,000 in profit rather than 10,000. Then you can fire your last worker once robots get advanced enough, paying 36,000 in UBI taxes rather than 60,000 in labor while still making $70,000 a year.
Mason Jones
Anti-UBI, help me out here:
I'm a hikikomori NEET welfare parasite. Due to my allergies and my autism, services jobs that would likely not get phased out by probots are out of the question for me: What should I learn to make myself useful and contribute to society... without having to work in something I have engage daily and constantly with people? Someone suggested IT, but won't that get pawned by probots later on?
Ayden Young
The problem is that if there aren't any where near enough jobs then the unemployed people wouldn't be able to afford it even if it was almost free. To solve this the government could give people salaries for doing 'fake' jobs, but then you might as well just have UBI. Maybe if robots in this scenario weren't doing jobs of a certain kind perhaps people could be paid for doing them. Ie accompanying old people or helping them, that is if robots don't already do that job. The real challenge is that capitalism as it is has to change in an automation scenario. Capitalism requires continual growth. As people lose jobs to robots the consumer base will grow smaller and smaller. A large part of Fordism and its success was that it turned workers into potential consumers. Having a decreasing consumer base with employees that don't have needs in a human sense (robots) will leave goods being created without the buyers required. What will happen is one of the great unknowns. We can't really predict what will happen until it does. And if it goes sour then by then it will already be too late.
Christopher Reyes
But, as I've already stated, it's nearly impossible to starve to death in the united states without automated agriculture. What market would they be selling to if nobody had any jobs or money? This argument presupposes that either A) every job would be removed by automation or B) Those displaced by automation would have no place in the economy. Both views seem to take a static view of markets, wherein a change is local and makes no difference to the rest of the economy. Study the histpry of the industrial revolution and you'll see that we've already overcome much more dire transitions. Much of the pain was due to such static views of the economy. Your comment has merit in that there is a danger to the current organization of the world in the face of such a fundamental change. But we shouldn't assume that the change is bad just because the growing process is painful. Furthermore we shouldn't take a process to it's most extreme possible stage of evolution. These are all still hypotheticals, remember. Automation may taper off or even fail abjectly.
Evan Lopez
The US is no longer a production economy. The consumer economy is failing because we have no income to spend. At the very least, UBI would resuscitate the system we have.
Parker Wright
Study mathematics. Program AI. It's what I'm doing.
Jacob Jenkins
Precisely, these cucks who defend Capitalism fail to realize that jobs aren't created by people at the top. They're created by people at the bottom wanting to buy things from those at the top.
We cannot have a consumer based economy if people can't afford to consume. Right now it's hard to even find employment and even if you do, it's mostly part time at 7.25 an hour. No one can survive on that
Carson Gonzalez
Not even just that, but we don't even have real capitalism anymore. Monopoly and the free market are incompatible. There's no competition anymore anywhere.
Hunter Smith
Especially not when corporations are given millions in Corporate Welfare while Johnny Q. Public is taxed heavily to make sure the Walton Family doesn't have to pay a fucking dime. Thus ensuring none of us can make small bussinesses to compete with the big wigs.
Carter Wood
For those interested in what jobs are most likely to be automated and least likely to be automated, here is a list. Look at the appendix at the end of the paper. Pic unrelated.
UBI would literally just give every person who is just barely breaking even the kind of money surplus that is needed for the gratuitous spending our consumer economy needs to survive.
UBI would turn us all into investors. It's not like welfare in that it gives people a handout when they're struggling, but it would just systematically lift all boats by force. Yeah, maybe some people would squander it. But I think most people in the middle and lower class would not.
Jack Hughes
I in to. do dab liqer sto take ubi?
Alexander Nguyen
>minimum required to live >most people live on the bare minimum required to live with no option to make any more
sounds like hell
Adrian Watson
balkanization of large countries and said countries being self sufficient rather than globalized
Camden Sullivan
If I had UBI, I'd just find friends of mine who were getting the same money and funnel it into a local book store/publishing company. Allowing us to get the most of our buck and give oppurtunities to our community.
Do you think I could ever accomplish that under the current system's starvation wages combined with unpredictable schedules? Preach my friend, a future where we are allowed to pursue our own paths instead of being enslaved by corporations
Anthony Rogers
muh socialism
why wouldn't people have acces to automation too?
Juan Bennett
also, who gives a shit about basic incomes and money if we're being replaced?
Jonathan Hernandez
Some form of UBI, or a similar approach is required, because if there are no entry level or "basic" jobs, a sizable amount of people are not getting employed, and those people are inevitably going to turn to crime and revolt when push comes to shove. I believe it was Hawking that said a possibility to keep people gainfully employed is to divvy out the robots doing the work the employees, and the humans job is then to supervise the machine. No matter what happens, you have to have some form of compensation for those myriad jobs that are just going to vanish.
Aaron Martinez
Because Capitalists would say "MY PRIVATE PARTY! GET YOUR OWN 50 BILLION DOLLAR MACHINE IF YOU WANT BENIFIETS FROM IT!"
Aiden Gray
This.
Adrian Butler
All automation does is create different jobs and free people to do other jobs. You can replace cashiers in McDonalds, but you still need people in the kitchen. Thanks to automation, programmers have become a common job and coders are in demand, something that never existed in the early 20th century.
Samuel Reyes
like they did with cars?
Aaron Morris
I'm a hikiNEET parasite, if I were that smart I wouldn't be poor and on welfare. I'll give it a read in a bit, thanks.
Michael King
Yes actually, you ever live in a rural area? Most people's cars are falling apart and people have to get to work on mopeds because we simply can't afford them.
Also it took till forty five years after cars were created for them be in common use while the rich who had them ran people over for fun due to a lack of traffic laws. True story.
Joseph Roberts
>those people are inevitably going to turn to crime any evidence for that? or just what you would do?
Eli Jones
when was the first robot invented?
Liam Diaz
There are no jobs, you are hungry.......
What do?
Alexander Mitchell
American friendo, maybe I'm wrong and might recuperate my lost intellect, where do I start with math if I end up taking that path?
Chase Murphy
That's highly debateable, one must first define what they mean by robot.
Leo Wilson
Ask Lenin.
Lucas Foster
find a way of making money
is it your contention that poverty causes crime?
what %?
Joseph Barnes
Establish Communism and kill the Tsar, watch it work until your country is destroyed by WW2 creating a paranoid Stalin.
Anthony Edwards
off yo go then
Jacob Taylor
New industries will flourish in giving the people the illusion of purpose and community contribution
VR will play a major role
William Moore
Well yeah
College costs money, I have no money, there are no jobs around, I'm fucking starving. Can't invest in anything if I have no money.... so what choice do I have outside of starting to steal?
Luis Robinson
Right so people with no hope to get a job because they are dumb motherfuckers and are starving will just quietly die out so as to not inconvenience the rest of us, that is indeed how human nature works, very collectivist.
We have crime for dumb bullshit like some nig wanting a new pair of Jordans, now add in the necessity to survive and see how that works out for you without just mowing down anyone unemployed.
Angel Cox
Was it ever going to be another way?
When you have nothing to lose, why not start a revolution and just take what you need?
Samuel Lewis
This people fail to realize that welfare isn't there to encourage laziness, it was "Let's give niggers a check so they don't run into the white part of town and start looting shit."
Ayden Hughes
Start by studying proofs and number theory. Then do Linear algebra and understand multidimensional tensors. Then calculus. Then you're ready to start learning about artificial neural networks, loss functions, softmax regression, etc.
Owen Walker
what happens in high crime areas? do rich people prefer them over low crime rate areas? do businesses?
does anyone that can leave do so?
Ryan Hernandez
If my choices are violence or starvation..... Desperate times call for desperate measures. What was I supposed to just sit back and say "Well the tsar doesn't think I'm useful enough to deserve food, guess I'll go die in a corner without making a fuss as not to inconvience him."
Caleb Diaz
> without just mowing down anyone unemployed. Weeeeellllll...
Elijah Sanchez
High Crime areas exist due to lack of oprrutunity, if there were jobs for those people to work, they wouldn't be criminals.
