Libertarians answer this

What is the libertarian answer to automation?

You can't simply kill people off either, since those people are your customers.

Automation + less people in the workforce = less velocity of money = stagnant economy.

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mises.org/blog/when-low-wage-workers-are-better-robots
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8/10

democratic socialists have already got an answer btw, its UBI. Universal basic income, this will keep velocity of money in the economy.

deflation
not even a libertarian

this isnt bait, dont dismiss it as such simply because you cannot find an answer to it.

>deflation
to what ends.
there is a certain point, especially with fiat money that it becomes unsustainable

>to what ends.
until the price of labor come down enough
>becomes unsustainable
Why is it unsustainable?

>until the price of labor come down enough
the future lacks labor in all regards. even surgeons will be obsolete.
>Why is it unsustainable?
due to the first point i made, its fiat money, it relies on belief alone. there is no labor backing it, no commodities such as gold. theoretically, in a libertarian society, there would be just 1 person left with all the wealth + robots.

is that a win for humanity? why should the average joe vote for that? to be euthanized?

*never mind the anarcho capitalists, that would literally be somalia


The only sensible solution is social democracy or technocracy.

no replies? seems i've won this argument. libertarians btfo

Jobs don't disappear, they just change.

>"Why should freight be carried from New York to Chicago by railroads when we could employ enormously more men, for example, to carry it all on their backs."

We've been automating for years now, it increases production, creates jobs in other areas, and grows the economy.

change to what? the only jobs available would be electrical and electronic engineers.

The thing about libertarianism is that we don't pretend to have all the answers, but we KNOW, that someone have; about automation, it's highly unlikely that laubor become a past need, machines have a limit, it's not because we didn't reach it that it doesn't have, but let's say it have, a UBI seems good to me, you don't need a gov to do that

there is a limit. and i agree, if we did it slowly, it could work, but companies (in a libertarian society) wouldn't do that, since we are at the edge. we will automate nearly all jobs after we have a decent AI.

hundreds of millions of jobs disappearing at once, cannot be good for the economy.

Robots dont spend money either, only their owners will, and thus, the velocity of money decreases dramatically.

>Not be a bitch
>Buy all the robots
>Build shit

.... seems like jobs and more output are in the future, OP. Possibly better global working conditions to boot. They said the same about the industrial and computer revolution. Its called evolving with the market, not regulating it.

ask someone to hypothesize the emergence of social media manager jobs before the creation of the internet or even before facebook/twitter. So what if everyone is engineers, the birthrate will decrease accordingly, natrually, and smoothly in capitalist countries, and socialist countries will shoot themselves in a foot trying UBI and add another chapter to the Gulag
Archipelgo

The libertarian answer to automation is that it's none of the government's business whether an industry automates or not. The free market will sort it out.

First of all, I doubt you know what velocity of money means.
Second, automation had been going on before your grandparents were even born. In 1870, almost 50 percent of the US population was employed in agriculture. As of 2008, less than 2 percent of the population is directly employed in agriculture. You don't see people complaining about that, because the modern American agriculture sector is a 100 times more productive.
Third, someone has to make the machines you know, even if you had machine making machines, you would still need a human to start the chain of production. You would still need a human who studies surgery to make a robot surgeon, there's no getting around that.
Some people lose their jobs with automation but others don't and society adapts in the end. Don't you think horse breeders bitched to high heaven when automobiles were fist introduced? Do you see people complaining about the loss of jobs in the horse breeding industry today?

Also 7/10 bait but I just felt like making a point.

>a UBI seems good to me, you don't need a gov to do that

you need someone to collect taxes from the corporations + workers, build roads, hospitals, schools, and then to redistribute the money as the UBI, that basically is government,

Cientists, artists, psycologists, electronic engeneers, business men, besides, if we reach a point of complete automation, scarcity would probably be a past problem, no scarcity means no price, no price means no need for money.

Automation -> less people with money -> no product being bought -> no money for rich people

It wouldn't be in the best interest of manufacturers to increase automation, its an unsustainable business model. Only commies want automation

Taxes? How would taxes be a thing with no one having an income (besides de UBI)?

If everything is automated people will earn their living buy purchasing equity in automated businesses and also in information generation.

If you can't do those things, pls starve.

Automation also = more purchasing power. The less money spent in one part of the economy will go into another part of the economy and make jobs there.

Basically this. I'm exited to see socialist countries commit seppuku trying to adapt while America prospers as always

not this queer thread. automation = computerization. oooh scary. we've been automating jobs for 4 decades. big whoop. technology creates more jobs than it destroys. stop with this gay topic. its as if we will have conquered every single human "need" in 20 years. not likely......

This is incorrect because it is taking money from a necessarily more productive part of the economy and moving it to a less productive one. People don't just take profit and sit on a pile of cash. That money will be reinvested in more capital and the resources needed to utilize it. Even if it sits in a bank the bank will lend it out to further business ventures. UBI only works in a post scarcity paradise, which means we are no longer discussing reality

So it would automatically turn into utopian communism?

Yes since free time will not get people to think up new things.

6,795/10 bread

Have a read of chapter 7 of Economics in One Lesson, it explains better than I can here. I will try to paraphrase an example:
>clothing manufacturer buys machine to make coats for half the labour, and drops half his labour force
>machine itself requires labour to make and install
>after the machine has paid for itself the clothing manufacturer is making more profits (else he would not have bought it)
>he may use his profits in one or more of 3 ways:
>1) expands operation and buys more machines
>2) invests in another industry
>3) increases his own consumption
>whichever option(s) he chooses, he has increased employment

>Its called evolving with the market,
evolving with the market means a culling of the average worker essentially. well, unless you want Neet revolutions popping up.

>So what if everyone is engineers, the birthrate will decrease accordingly, natrually, and smoothly in capitalist countries

except we both know that isnt true, for one, not everyone will be engineers, and especially at the levels of the future, the average IQ of those people would have be extremely high. (and even then, one day they'll be automated by an AI they create).

secondly, it wont smoothly dcerease, it would be a mass starvation/genocide. whos to say it wont spawn the largest terrorist groups in human history.

>socialist countries will shoot themselves in a foot trying UBI

UBI is the only sensible solution, both to pacify the population + keep the economy running, we need consumers to consume, if there's no consumer, who are the robots going to be making products for? does a robot need an iphone? or a watch? or a packet of crisps?

>no price means no need for money.
no need for human beings

taxes on the corporations, they'll still be making an income to start off.

>thinking that companies care more about long term sustainability(+100 yrs) than short term capital. Its a never ending race. Give me an example of a communist country were automation is a main priority of the government.

>People don't just take profit and sit on a pile of cash
except thats exactly what happens. in a monopoly do you think the owner will see a need to expand?

(libertarian govt btw) (govt. cannot break up monopolies)

UBI could also be used to violate the NAP as a government could (and inevitably would) leverage UBI to coerce it's citizens (through threat of starvation)

What's the citizen? you were caught speaking badly about the government on a chinese cartoon forum? No UBI for you.

If a government can give something to it's citizens, sure as shit it can take it away.

Gotta have faith that people will find other avenues to sustain themselves with some creativity.

>UBI is the only sensible solution
>UBI is sensible
>UBI

get out

Well said.

Also, obligatory fuck socialism.

Monopolies are the outcome of government intervention, not the outcome of direct competition. Basically the government creates a barrier to new competition through regulation and law that heavily favors the existing enterprise and stifles newcomers from coming in at a lower, competitive price point.

Again I didn't say that everyone would be engineers, I said that we won't be able to predict the what the emerging market centered around automation will look and by extension we can't anticipate the new jobs. Long term, birth rates will adjust for less jobs which is a big assumption that there will be less jobs.

Already we are seeing a shift towards artisan production of goods that can be acquired from the mass market. Shitty Heineken or artisan craft beer, target t shirt or naturally sourced sun bleached alpaca cotton.

negative income tax, look it up.

Crafticilture is the new thing

that would work for a year or two. then due to inflation the UBI would have to keep increasing exponentially. its the epitome of democratic policy, works great for a little while and gets you elected. fucks over everyone in the future.

In economics, a negative income tax (NIT) is a progressive income tax system where people earning below a certain amount receive supplemental pay from the government instead of paying taxes to the government.

>Government

mises.org/blog/when-low-wage-workers-are-better-robots

exactly, why do you think that the pharma industry is the way it is. largely due to patents.

this isnt true in the case of mass automation that we are facing, something like 40 percent of jobs in Scotland are at high risk, 30% of jobs in america are at a high risk of automation, its basically between 30-50% everywhere else in the world as well, but these types of technologies are growing at a logarithmic rate, its being developed and rolled out faster than new jobs can be created and its spreading outside of just factory jobs and transport jobs, it encompasses almost all jobs because of the leaps and bounds being made in artificial intelligence, these highly versatile deep learning algorithms can pick up almost any human skill with in a matter of hours, and be better than any human in less than a day, and as they broaden their skillset, they can transfer knowledge and techniques learned from one skill to a completely new skill that they are picking up. This isnt luddite 2.0, its much worse than that.

Something like 80% of jobs we have today are going to be automated within less than 10 years.

In response to OP

As a libertarian, my answer to this is UBI. I think it will be a necessity, UBI would be easy to implement, and you wouldnt need to tax the general population to get it, you'd only need to install a small automation tax, this will stop the economy from stagnating, and give people more to create the jobs necessary to offset the market shock of mass automation.

In this case its more about pragmatism than simply principle, as a libertarian I think you need to have as little taxes as you are capable of having, this is one tax that I do support because its the only practical solution to a daunting issue.

Automation is a terrible thing for any economic system that hasn't solved resource scarcity issues.

This will naturally kill off several sectors of the population, education will become so fiercely competitive in a free market society to even get paid a shit wage and in a socialist society basically worthless because it isn't worth the effort.

We need to hold off any further automation till things like food and energy have long term solutions.

...

>h-hey guys I'm totally a libertarian like you and UBI would be great. Did I mention that I'm a libertarian, your guard should be down now so I can push marxist shit on you

Yeah, I subscribe to Friedman's economic theories, we don't all defend the abolition of the state you know? We just want small government, and bareable social order. Friedman isn't an Ancap. Also yeah, if there's state, you're always going to have to pay some taxes. We just defend that the tax should be set at the minimum a governemt need to do its most basic things. Also, with negative income tax, there would be no need for social security or any other type of gibs and the IRS system would be streamlined, saving time and money. Any questions?

stfu about ubi, that's free gibs. A negative income tax would be a better policy, you'd only recieve money if at least you had started working and had gotten laid off or something.

Lol look at this retard

This

>WHAT'S INFLATION?

*Deregulate!* *Deregulate!*

Even the "poor" already have a higher standard of living in this country than 99.99999% of humanity has enjoyed over the course of human history. They'll still get their goodies at walmart.

Syria producing the beady redpills as always.

In the year 1820, 90% of Americans were farmers or had agriculture related jobs. Nowadays only about 12% of Americans have agriculture related jobs.

1800's /pol: > in 100 years , 90% of agriculture jobs will be replaced by machines! How will poor people find jobs?

>proxies producing the redpills as always.

its to be expected for someone autistic enough to pay for a flag to LARP on a Botswanan bot fly appreciation forum

Someone has to make, advertise and repair the robots.

A negative income tax works as well. Your suggestion that you only receive money if you're laid off doesnt solve the problem of millennials and gen z kids who will not be able to find a job to begin with though.

UBI or a negative income tax wouldnt be that expensive to implement in a post-automation scenario, automation ensures cheap domestic labor, and a dramatic drop in prices because of increased productivity per dollar, which means that you dont need that much money live off of.

I really am a libertarian, but in this case i am looking for a pragmatic solution rather than a solution based purely on the principles of the free market. I think in the long term we will see more technology jobs, the problem is almost all low skill jobs will be wiped out which means people arent going to be able to earn the money they need to go to college to learn the skills they need to break into the emerging automation related jobs market. Certain high skill jobs will be wiped out as well as the low skill jobs, which is going to mean a lot of people will need to retrain, and theres no guarantee that what they train in isnt going to also get automated.

So we're faced with a weird issue, with no one perfect solution. My worry is that if too many people lose their jobs and there really arent enough jobs to go around, then spending will stagnant, which will cause the market to get all fucked because no one will be able to spend money, which will drive some businesses under, and will force other businesses to expand automation to ensure that their prices remain low enough to still be bought by the few people who will have kept their jobs.

كس أمك

The free market will fix it

>more robots

Comparing automation to the industrial revolution is just stupid. In the industrial revolution, machines started replacing human muscles. It was obvious that human minds would be still needed. But with automation and AI, you're replacing both human thinking and muscles with robots. ~99% of jobs can be automatized partly or completely within the next 50 years. What do humans have to offer at the job? 8 hour work days, bathroom breaks, lunch times, inefficiency, whining, socialising, vacations... a robot will do 24/7 for far cheaper. Most people are not smart to become engineers or the like.

''Oh there will be jobs'' is wishful thinking. No, new jobs (for humans) will not pop up if a robot can do it cheaper. The future is absolutely dreadful. I can imagine a worldwide existential crisis when people don't have work to occupy their minds with.

hate to break it to ya buddy but just because you like snakes and yellow flags, your're not libertarian.

>i am looking for a pragmatic solution rather than a solution based purely on the principles of the free market

see definition of libertarian

UBI more like UTI amirite

Anything that can be automated is a soulcrushing experience anyway. Let the robots drive down the cost of necessary goods. Demand will increase for artisinal goods, art, entertainment, service industry workers, and other luxuries.

The jobs won't all be focused on robot engineering, robot programming, and robot maintenance. With an increase in free time and disposable income from cheaper goods, we'll demand more frivolous things to fill our time.

>when you're libertarian and you get to the libertarian thread 68 replies in
eh it doesn't even matter what i say anymore

what do libertarians have to do with automation? EVERYONE is automating, even commies.

there are still LARPERS

:3 cute. CUTE!

Let people do what they want

Automation doesn't stagnate the economy. The types of jobs that are available just shift around.

Remind me, Whats the economy type that accounts for human evil?

whew

An interesting thought. As the higher in demand jobs get replaced with ai/mechanization, People will in fact have to work less and less to meet their basic needs to survive as we have seen in the last century.(this will kill the need for UBI, yet many govt will probably see it as a good ROI anyway) The jobs that were once in high demand based on physical reality (food production) (infrastructure) (Manufacturing) will turn into work increasingly in the conceptual/emotional/mental realm. We see since the 80's, capital pooling into tech companies and entertainment, creating income inequality and trump as a rejection of the future. The amount of humans needed to physically make things will dwindle, so we become a mental/emotional economy. Once AI takes that over, It will be very interesting time to be alive indeed. I am no libertarian but to play advocate i think economies will continue to shift into new sectors untill we are totally taken care of eventually spurring the education of how deeply vast the universe is and how insignificant we are within it. We will explore the cosmos forever looking for lifeforms to share existensial loneliness or become subject to depression, and stop reproducing and eventually phase ourselves out if AI does not do it first. Look at birthrates of developed vs developing countries. I have been to cuba recently, it is a very poor island but they do have a quasi-universal basic income in place, capitalism seeps in everywhere yes, but you can tell how their economy has had to decentralize to art/education/healthcare in order for their economy to survive, hell, they export their doctors to nearby nations to trade for oil. Those who do not find alternative employment dont reproduce,

TLDR: Productive Capitalism naturally will create ultimate socialism, which will eventually kill us off unless we contine to find a truth to pivot to.

On 99% of issues I would want the free market to deal with it, on this one particular issue I dont see how it could deal with it. I think entrepreneurship will offset some of the job loss, however I dont see how gen z and millennials are going to be able to make the money to start their own businesses.

I know exactly what libertarianism is, I know exactly what the principals are, I just fail to see how in this particular case it will be able to cope with the shock of widespread, rapid, automation.

On one hand goods will fall dramatically in price, however on the other hand, people are going to be able to spend their money because they arent going to have the ability to earn.

I think the free markets ability to create the jobs necessary to keep people employed will be lacking given the speed at which the automation is going to be rolled out.

How do you propose this issue is dealt with given the complexity of it? Do you have a solution that will work that completely aligns with the principles of libertarianism? because I have looked for one and I dont have a solid one.

Basically this but this is going to happen a lot faster than 50 years. Automatization and Artificial intelligence are going to explode in the next 5 years, if you chart their progression on a timeline, you will realize that it is a logarithmic growth pattern. Ray kurzweil and a few other people talking a lot about this and its something important to consider when making predictions about future technology.

...

>Basically this but this is going to happen a lot faster than 50 years.
I know, rounded it up a few years just so nobody could deny that it would at least eventually happend.

It seems like many libertarians are dogmatic on their belief that there absolutely will become new jobs (for humans, not robots). I don't wonder why, because an automated/AI society absolutely ruins the idea that there is a job for everyone and free markets will fix everything. The average worker is fucking stupid, and in the late-automatisation time, only few efficient inventors, engineers, bankers and entrepreneurs are needed to run practically everything. Human workers will be obsolete.

>(You)
There has never been need for human beings

who is that cutie

Who's this qt3,14

lol a lot of studies show that automation is good for costumers ( prices go down) employers (theres no need to ppl do shitty jobs so they need to more specialization jobs for more money)

Same thing that happened when autmation took over textile and farm industries; find something the machines can't do. Once we get to 100% automation, then no one needs to do fuck all anymore.

im drunk kek, but u know what i mean

Technically you are right, but you forget that also technically, human beings need human beings.

Government in control of automation will always maintain control of automation for the elite.
Ergo, stop fucking sliding you shill.

I agree with what you are saying. Im a libertarian and on most issues I believe that it should be left up to the free markets to adjust. This is the only issue I dont think the free market will be able to cope with, at least in the short term, I think other libertarians really need to sit down and think about this from a pragmatic standpoint rather than a purely ideological standpoint.

Banking is going to be automated, its been in the process of being automated since the 80s.The other things you listed will likely be okay, I think we need to put emphasis on entrepreneurship as a society, I think it is a good idea for people to try and run their own businesses, that will be insanely important in helping with the job loss caused by automation, however there are still going to be a LOT of people with no potential to earn their own money, I think if we live it up to the free market we're going to see people starve, and see them become aggravated, and thats how revolutions start, and the last thing we want is some fucking revolution and some commies taking over.

Automation has the potential to spark huge conflicts that stem from a fear that people wont be able to take care of themselves, and that no one else will be able to take care of them. Thats how you end up with communism or some shit.

Automation is good, it will make bigger profit margins for business owners. I fail to understand your question.

Humans are not horses.

To AI, we might as well be.

This is general true only if the market can continue to create new jobs for people, which is only possible when automation happens slowely, which its not, its happening faster and faster.
Let me give you can example of whats happening in one industry, once self driving cars and trucks are wide spread, in some towns in america, something like 30-40% of jobs are transport jobs, these towns economies are built on the trucking and transport industry, when those jobs dry up and the truckers leave, the businesses there are going to have to close up shop and head to the cities, we're going to see massive amounts of immigration from rural communities, it'll be like the dust bowl 2.0

That one industry disappearing is going to have huge ramifications. This is going to happen under 3 years.

In the following years we're going to see even more industries seeing massive amounts of automation, which is going to shock the economy. Its going to happen so fast that the free market will not have enough time to create jobs to replace the jobs being lost. There will be an employment crisis.

It doesnt mean bigger profit margins because the economy will stagnant, jobs will be lost at an increasingly rapid rate, too fast for the free market to create new jobs to replace the lost jobs, which means that people arent going to be spending, which is bad for businesses and the economy as a whole.

Late 19th century/early 20th century automation is literally completely different from modern automation. Early automation essentially took skilled labor (tailoring for one), and equalized the skill portion so that anybody could do it. In effect, you have skilled labor radically replaced by assisted unskilled labor. Any joe can (help) make a car, any joe can cross Rockies, any joe can make a prepackaged dinner etc. Today we are seeing the reverse with unskilled labor being completely replaced by machine supervised by skilled labor. Here we are trading unskilled labor for skilled labor. Completely different, since the human capital requirement is now increasing rather than decreasing. You need to get smarter to have a job in the future economy, anything repetitive that doesn't require flexibility or a degree of creativity can be predictably automated out. You're being intellectually dishonest trying to compare a horse vs car with truck driver vs self-driving AI here

>it's different this time because I want my communist fantasy bullshit instead
Fuck off

this

I hate seeing people treating modern automation like luddite 2.0 and brushing it off as nothing. Its intellectually dishonest, and willful ignorance. Its dangerous.

What the fuck does anything i just said have to do with communism?

>Automation + less people in the workforce = less velocity of money = stagnant economy.
If you have robots producing goods for you and maintaining themselves, you don't need to participate in the economy all that much. The economy will scale itself back as it becomes less useful. The problem solves itself.

>people think that there won't be jobs in the future due to automation
>despite the fact that jobs are already popping up to replace those being displaced
you guys can lose your shit over this all you want but the economy will be fine