[bsaunder]

I agree with the premise that machines will increasing exceed our capabilities (and are improving quicker than we are). This seems so obvious as to be not debatable.

I also think there are a lot of merits to online-education and Udacity seems to have the right general idea. On-line education needs to be more engaging and entertaining than simply videos and online collaboration.

However, this whole "people need more skills" and "we need more jobs" meme feels like a losing fight with reality. In fact this push for increased human skills seems like it will only widen the gap between the uber skilled and the 99%. In our current economic model, this seems like increased pain for most of us.

IMHO it would be much better if we could stop this denial. We need to pivot our economic system towards a basic income model. I think a much better strategy would be for us to start focusing our best and brightest on full automation of our needs and basic wants so that we can provide most essential services to people with minimal human and resource cost.

[mathattack]

Many great scientists (Einstein amongst them) get into trouble when they veer into Economics. Einstein predicted social unrest from massive unemployment due to productivity improvements. Productivity improvements help people in aggregate.

The question here is will a small subset of the world accrue all the benefit from the AI productivity improvement? One answer is basic income, presumably based on taxation of the rich. Is another answer some kind of universal ownership scheme of the companies creating the AI? I'm not advocating government ownership of business (this rarely ends well) but perhaps some way for the government to give shares in index funds in lieu of basic cash payments? Essentially equity based social security or welfare payments in lieu of some portion of the cash payments. I haven't thought this fully through yet, but it does allow some aspect of shared upside. (My sense is there will be a lot of shared upside anyway, similar to how we all benefit from free maps and search)

[hiddencost]

Russia tried that. When the USSR ended, they gave every one vouchers to bid for shares of state owned companies. The little people had no idea what they were doing and got screwed brutally. It created many of the ridiculously wealthy Russian oligarchs you see today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia

[nhaehnle]

Interesting. The fundamental goal seemed a noble one, but it was badly implemented. Any lessons to take away?

One immediate idea is some kind of vesting, i.e. you can't actually sell your vouchers for X years (or stages, being able to sell certain percentages after a certain number of years).

A second idea is to encourage the formation of public interest associations to manage the ownership. There are already some non-traditional funds run with some social goals in addition to the goal of making money, perhaps that would help. (But I'm really just brainstorming right now.)

[ambicapter]

My knee-jerk reaction is that these people got bit because they weren't educated on the matter, so free education would've been helpful. Incidentally, I feel like that would help with the original problem as well.

I am really starting to think that government should reduce the cost of education as a public good.

[Florin_Andrei]

It could be argued that the population over there was very unprepared to make these choices - 3 generations of communism tend to shape your thinking in interesting ways.

[d883kd8]

> equity based social security or welfare payments

I seem to remember Bush II proposing this early in his first term. I was quite young at the time, but I remember some some stuff about "Ownership Society" and a scheme that boiled down to "let's take the social security money and invest it."

[jqm]

I wasn't that young at the time and maybe I'm a cynic, but what I heard was "let's take the social security money and let my campaign contributors skim off the top".

I also heard him talking about ownership in the sense everyone should own a home. Right at the peak of the housing bubble. Lots of people took a big hit.

[mathattack]

There was talk of turning social security into private investment vehicles. (Similar to a 401K) Lots of problems with that, but the current system isn't so great either.

What I'm trying to get at here though isn't just turning people into equity investors, but specifically capturing the upside from an environment where robots do all the work and the gains are captured mostly by an oligopoly of their makers.

If the robots (or AI) are broadly created and owned, this is much less of a problem.

[loup-vaillant]

If World War 2 counts as "social unrest", I'd say Einstein got à point.

[mathattack]

World War 2 wasn't caused by too much productivity.

[loup-vaillant]

It appears World War 2 came from fascism… which came from fed up people… because massive unemployment… because failure to handle productivity increases.

Productivity increases by itself will never cause problem. If we become 1000 times more productive overnight, we have loads of excellent solutions to handle it. Like have people work only 1 day per year, relying on voluntary service, increase material wealth like crazy…

But we've gotta admit, our society sucks at absorbing productivity increases. Just watch what will happen to professional drivers in the 10, 15 years to come. If we don't come up with something, the shock will be brutal.

[analyst74]

When people think state owned enterprises, they think the failed USSR and communism ideal.

A more recent and viable model to look at is probably some of the successful Sovereign wealth fund, like Norway, UAE, Qatar and etc.

[mathattack]

I was thinking Singapore, but is that scalable?

[pen2l]

> Many great scientists (Einstein amongst them) get into trouble when they veer into Economics. Einstein predicted social unrest from massive unemployment due to productivity improvements. Productivity improvements help people in aggregate.

Can you please expand? I did not know of this

[Umn55]

His own words:

https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/

[bduerst]

UBI isn't the answer - there are goods and services with income-elastic prices that will be just as out of reach with UBI as it was before.

A prime example of this is housing, which is why many government welfare programs stipulate what the delivered value can be spent on (food stamps, medicaid, etc.) as opposed to just open-ended income.

Is it perfect? No. With every massive government program comes bureaucratic overhead - but throwing it out for something without the overhead but potentially economically damaging side effects isn't the solution.

[JoshTriplett]

> However, this whole "people need more skills" and "we need more jobs" meme feels like a losing fight with reality.

In the long-term, sure: if we can successfully build an AI smarter than humans, it's unlikely any job will survive. But at the same time, no job will need to; there's a balance there. Planning for a post-scarcity economy makes sense, but the plans that work in such an economy don't necessarily work when scarcity still exists.

[StavrosK]

> But at the same time, no job will need to

Why? Because this AI, which is basically just people smarter than us and getting smarter by the day, will decide that its only purpose in life is to serve its idiot masters?

[JoshTriplett]

Because if we build it correctly, it won't be a person at all, and won't have a value function orthogonal to our own. Building something that can self-improve and solve problems doesn't mean we need to build something that has independent will, motivation, or values. And it's a lot safer not to.

[StavrosK]

Sure, but "an AI that's smarter than humans" implies that. I'm sure we'll build many algorithms that are better than us at specific tasks, and we already have.

[JoshTriplett]

Even building algorithms that are better than us at any general-purpose task still doesn't require giving those algorithms agency or independent values of their own.

[Mimu]

I agree with that. Not sure if the basic income is THE solution, I didn't think about it too much, but I agree with everything else.

People don't need jobs, they need money. Jobs are the only legal way to get money but money is the issue, not jobs.

[filoeleven]

> People don't need jobs, they need money. Jobs are the only legal way to get money but money is the issue, not jobs.

People don't need money, they need a level of security in the basic necessities: food, water, shelter. Money is the primary legal way to get these things, but the basic necessities are the issue, not money.

Basic income, or any good solution involving money, is pragmatic and worthy of consideration since money is so embedded in the culture, but when we are talking about real needs we're talking about physical needs, of which money is not one.

[afarrell]

I'm honestly curious how many people on HN oppose mincome on grounds other than "we currently can't pay that much."

[Florin_Andrei]

> In fact this push for increased human skills seems like it will only widen the gap between the uber skilled and the 99%.

What happens is that pressure is simply increasing all the time, and people are on a bell curve w.r.t. how well they can keep up. We are effectively grabbing that bell curve and pulling its ends much further apart.

We need a solution, otherwise things are going to get very, very ugly.

[criddell]

> We need to pivot our economic system towards a basic income model.

So putting a floor on what people get each year seems like a pretty good idea. How about a ceiling as well? What's an equitable spread? 10x? 100x? Should the basic income given to residents of Manhattan be 2.5x what people in Wichita get?

[danans]

Basic income isn't intended to pay for luxuries such rent/real-estate in Manhattan. If one wants to live a very high quality of life in a desirable place, one will still have find a way to make enough money to afford that outside of basic income.

The idea is to lift the very bottom of the income distribution, those who are likely to be put out of work first by automation, to a level where they are not plagued by a desperation for basics that causes them to damage themselves and society (i.e. drug abuse, crime). People in that situation already represent a significant cost, both in dealing with the problems, and also in the lost human potential.

The hope is that as automation reduces the cost of a lot of basic consumables (not rent or real estate), fewer people are kept in the aforementioned desperation.

With automation, these consumables will also not vary tremendously in price between Manhattan and Wichita, since the one of the biggest differences in production costs between both places, labor, has been removed from the production costs. Therefore, there would be no need to index BI by location.

Basic income can't solve the problem where automation has effectively removed all human-added value in all jobs. At that point, we'd have to impose more dramatic measures of redistribution, and also come up with new ways of measuring individuals' contributions to the general welfare, and reward them based on that. But I think we're still far away from that.

[iamcurious]

>Should the basic income given to residents of Manhattan be 2.5x what people in Wichita get?

One of the main arguments of basic income, as opposed to unemployment benefits, is to reduce the bureaucracy involved. So the answer would be an empathetic 'no'. Hopefully, having a guaranteed income decoupled from location would push people to populate cheaper places. And thus, rent would get much cheaper overall.

[criddell]

> reduce the bureaucracy involved

Basic income indexed to a geographical cost of living doesn't have to be a big bureaucracy problem. Plus, I think segregating by wealth is a terrible idea.

[unabridged]

Checking that people actually live where they claim requires a big bureaucracy. For 2.5x the money a lot of people would claim to be homeless living in Manhattan.

[iamcurious]

>Basic income indexed to a geographical cost of living doesn't have to be a big bureaucracy problem.

See what unabridged said.

>Plus, I think segregating by wealth is a terrible idea.

Giving people more money because the rent is more expensive where they live equates to giving more money to landlords. That is an even more terrible idea.

Besides, Manhattan isn't that good of a place to live. Specially when you aren't tied to the job market and can take more risks.

[yazaddaruvala]

Governments shouldn't provide money. The ideas behind basic income are to ensure the majority of people are one step higher on the hierarchy of needs.

That said, it would be best for governments to provide free safe housing, heat, sanitation, food, water, communications (fast internet and telephone), medical care (including preventive care through gym memberships and such), and high quality accessible education, certification.

The reason I don't like basic income: while in comparison it's a lot easier to budget, it's also a lot harder to keep up to date, or keep geographically relevant. It's harder to find efficiencies, like Soylent for food or improving gyms, hospitals, schools. Its easily abused, money can buy guns or heroin, it doesn't always get used for food. Meanwhile, food in a world where food is free can only feed you and your family.

[criddell]

> That said, it would be best for governments to provide free safe housing, heat, sanitation, food, water, communications (fast internet and telephone), medical care (including preventive care through gym memberships and such), and high quality accessible education, certification.

That makes a lot of sense.

[JoshTriplett]

> How about a ceiling as well? What's an equitable spread?

In no possible way up to you to decide, thankfully.

It's one thing to say "nobody should go hungry or live on the street"; we could argue about the most efficient way to go about achieving that, but it's not an unreasonable statement. It's quite another thing to say "you're not allowed to be too successful or we'll steal it from you".

[criddell]

It isn't up to me to decide, but as a participant in our democracy, I have a say just like you.

> you're not allowed to be too successful or we'll steal it from you

Well, maybe there wouldn't be a hard ceiling, but I could see the revival of the 90% tax bracket for big earners.

[JoshTriplett]

> Well, maybe there wouldn't be a hard ceiling, but I could see the revival of the 90% tax bracket for big earners.

That's a very entitled, might-makes-right point of view; what gives you the right to do so, other than getting a mob together with enough might?

[criddell]

Again, I have only one vote, just like you. I don't think I have any particular right when it comes to setting policy.

But, if radical redistribution of wealth is wanted by voters, then the population can enact laws to make it happen.

I have no doubt that automation on a scale beyond what most people think is possible (and maybe desirable) is coming. Today, any talk of basic income in the US isn't going to go anywhere. However, at some point enough people are going to be out of work that they will be a big enough voting block that politicians will start restructuring the economy to make those voters happy. I'm not sure I see any other possible outcome.