[throwaway991199]

This sort of article should really serve as a wake up call to this community.

There was another article here recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12329255, where some comments mentioned that people should retrain once jobs become available for consistent automation.

Lets take the simple example of the machine that picks apples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBcWZcjXr-I

Typically immigrants do this work, low educated immigrants. They do it because they can't get any other work in higher skilled professions. Sure they could be a driver, oh wait soon that will be autonomous. They could work in a warehouse, oh wait Amazon is doing it's best to disrupt that. They could be a cleaner? Oh wait, companies like Roomba and Dyson are working to disrupt that.

The point I'm trying to make here, is for all the poorly/low educated people and lets be really, seriously honest are in the tens of millions. What are they going to do?

I've traveled all over the world, all the continents. There are segments of the population that can't read, can't write, can't even grasp basic maths. They are the ones who depend on these low end jobs.

Are you going to tell me with a straight face they they can re-train, go back to school and work in STEM? It's just not feasible. Also, who is going to pay for all these millions to retrain for years. Remember, they'll probably have to restart their education, basic maths, basic science, then college, then university. That's what 7 years? Who will pay for their living expenses for them and their family?

There is a ticking time-bomb coming soon. Where we'll have an OMEGA man type of situation. All sorts of jobs will be automated and people won't have anything to do.

What are the solutions?

1) Do we implement 1 child per couple policy? To lessen the burden on the state? 2) Do we provide free schooling with a zero-tolerance on NO child left behind? So that they can go on to STEM fields? 3) Are there enough places in STEM fields for those who do retrain to move into? Is this another thing for government to throw money at? 4) Does society move from a capitalist to a socialist/communist system? But what happens when government runs out of money?

What are we going to do?

Just saying people will retrain is just utter folly.

There is a time-bomb ticking and some of you just don't realise it.

Want to know the result of no jobs, low educated populous, government with no money, socialism failed. Oh yeah. Greece. How's that doing for the last 10 years? It will be like that for another 25.

[toomanybeersies]

We need to work less. Society has become more and more productive, but we still work 40 hours a week. There's this obsession that everyone has to be constantly working and then using this money to pay for things. We work to live and live to work.

People used to work 6 days a week, 12 hours a day. One of the effects of the industrial revolution was the 40 hour work week.

It takes less man-hours to create physical products than ever before. A man and a horse used to be able to work an acre a day, a man and a tractor can do 150 acres in a day, and the tractor drives itself.

That's a 15 000 % increase in productivity.

Clothing production has seen similar increases in productivity, so has mining.

We as a society are literally making work for the sake of it.

[bobthedino]

I agree, and am intrigued by where the 40 hour/5 day work week came from and what the consequences would be of reducing it. Why can't we aim for a world in which people can live happily by only spending half their time working, freeing up more time to actually enjoy ourselves? Is it because some people will always out-compete them by willingly working longer hours? Or something else?

[thatfrenchguy]

Historically, union-drived pressures and left wing politicians is what made the 40 hour week a thing from the previous 48/56/whatever. That's also how most European countries got paid vacations, ...

They have been completely neutralized since, especially on the "asking better conditions for everyone" front (a perfectly valid strategy when you think about it, companies will in the short term, especially for low skilled workers, make less money (that's ignoring the positive externalities from working less of course) ) hence why you don't see better living and working conditions.

Also, there is more mainstream media penetration, which leds people to be more exposed to the "working more is better" ideology.

[misja111]

Reducing the 40 hour working week still doesn't solve the problem of providing a means of living to uneducated workers whose jobs are taken over by AI. Some people suggest basic income as the solution: well forget about working less hours then for those people who still have a job, they will have to earn the money to pay for the part of society that can't get a job anymore.

[teddyh]

Basic Income is a large discussion in itself, and can’t be dismissed so easily, but this thread is not the place for such a discussion. You’ll have to wait until the next Basic Income thread comes up here on HN (as it has many times before), and try to make your simple dismissal then, and see what happens.

[TheOtherHobbes]

STEM work requires above-average intelligence, and even the most basic jobs are probably only available to 25% of the population. Hard-core mathematical engineering is only available to the top 1-2%. So yes - retraining is pointless if the raw ability isn't there.

But people don't need to retrain. What they need is an economic system that allocates their time usefully instead of declaring it worthless and wasting it.

The amount of work that needs to be done and can't yet be automated is almost infinite: infrastructure improvements, simple renovations, community projects, recycling - the unused pool of potential is huge.

[acjohnson55]

> STEM work requires above-average intelligence

I'm not entirely sure that's the case.

[mmierz]

It's not entirely the case right now, at least in sciences, there is still medium-skilled technician work.

But these jobs are subject to the same pressures as driving, cleaning and apple-picking. They're being increasingly automated and the technicians replaced by one person to operate the fluid-handling robots.

Edit: maybe I misinterpreted and you're saying that people don't need above-average intelligence to be an actual research scientist, perhaps on the non-tenure track level. Maybe that's true. But, it requires a strong interest and years of training, hence the long apprenticeship of the Ph.D / postdoc.

[acjohnson55]

I might have missed something -- I was thinking more of industry STEM jobs. I truly believe a lot of people can get into software development, for example, with normal intelligence, about a year of time investment, and perhaps above-normal self-motivation.

[jazzyk]

If you seriously think that all it takes is one year to become a competent software engineer/developer, sorry , but you have no clue what it means to develop good software.

Software development is devilishly complex (as in multi-dimensional, multi-disciplinary) to do right. It takes years to master it.

[acjohnson55]

I develop software for a living, and I dare say I'm better than most at it. I've been doing it about 20 years, since I was writing Z80 assembly as a middle schooler [1]. It would take a lot more than a year for someone to learn to do my job. But I'm a lead engineer, not an entry level developer.

However, it would take less than the total amount of time I've been building software to do what I do, because my path to my job took me through all sorts of software development I don't do anymore. That includes 8 years of higher ed, of which I apply only a tiny fraction on a daily basis. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't trade all that education for the world. I draw upon it in plenty of indirect ways. I just know there are more direct routes for someone who simply wants to become an application developer.

I know this, because I know plenty of people who have taken less than a year to get into the industry, and are now productive developers. One of my friends even wrote about how he did it in detail [2]. There's a fantastic episode of Software Engineering Daily interviewing a guy who landed a lucrative job at AirBnB little more than a year after doing a dev bootcamp [3]. My own brother has been in the industry less than a year after coming through General Assembly and is doing quite well. I interview people all the time who have similar stories. They're not unicorns.

Developing software isn't easy. But it's also not that hard. At least the sort of software most of us build. You only need a couple people at the typical enterprise who are capable of doing architecture and the most technically intense stuff.

[1] http://www.ticalc.org/archives/files/fileinfo/61/6175.html

[2] http://alexkrupp.typepad.com/sensemaking/2013/11/2012-my-yea...

[3] http://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2016/07/11/salary-negoti...

[nradov]

A person of average intelligence but with above average determination can earn a PhD in some scientific fields and make a useful contribution. I've seen it done.

[Pamar]

Are you sure that "no jobs, low educated populous" really describes Greece? Especially "Greece 10 years ago"?

I know plenty of highly educated Greek engineers or other professionals (e.g.: archeologists) and not being Greek myself I met them through international working groups, so I suppose they qualify as "educated-enough" outside their own borders, too.

On top of that, the current economical situation of Greece is due to some decisions taken outside of Greece itself and it is debatable if the current state of Greece was really the only possible outcome for them.

[gotchange]

Setting his/her rant aside, Greece is suffering from a serious case of "Brain Drain" that their brightest people had fled the country a long time ago even before this latest economic crisis hit them, and after that it accelerated this trend and became more pronounce to the point that it really drags their economic recovery.

I know some Greek expats and they told me about this problem and the dilemma that they're facing now between returning to the country and facing the mounting challenges there, or staying put and watching their country go through this difficult time from faraway.

So, certainly Greek people is not a low-educated populace or whatever he/she said.

[Pamar]

Yes, brain drain is an issue for sure (it is also an Issue in Italy, for example, even if the country is bigger and economy is somehow in a better situation, at least for now).

I am an (Italian) expat myself, so I know the dynamics very well.

[gotchange]

All the countries in the Mediterranean basin suffer from that phenomenon to a varying degree and the two Italian profs interviewed in the article is just another example for that phenomenon and the state of affairs in these countries.

So, blaming all the shortcomings it wholly on education or culture in general is unfair and misleading.

[NhanH]

The number of poorly/low educated people are in the hundreds of millions, if not billions.

And I'm not sure why you feel the need for a throwaway, seeing that HN user has a pretty big biased for basic income.

Also, I don't think your question quite hits the mark, for several problems. For one "runs out of money" is a pretty vague concept and you have to define it more strictly: seeing that money is merely an abstraction for our economy, do you mean a situation where privately owned automation/capital would mess up the economy as we know it (ie. money can't be used, massive inflation etc.), or do we run out of wealth (goods), or something else? In a magical-land of socialist/communist with state-own automation and capital, the first case isn't really a thing. If we run out of goods, then apparently the automation isn't enough and human needs to start getting to work again.

Jobs by itself is merely a proxy for productivity, and productivity is what we want/need. Trying to keep job AND reduce productivity isn't just solve any problem (since someone else will ignore it and blows you out of the water).

Your post has a lot of hidden assumptions -- on top of the fact that the issue itself is a hard one. I mean, if in the end there isn't enough resources to sustain the human population that we have right now, a whole lot of us is gonna die, in one way or another ...

[antisthenes]

> they'll probably have to restart their education, basic maths, basic science, then college, then university. That's what 7 years?

It's actually going to be closer to 10-12 years. And that's only going to get them to maybe a community college graduate level. They still won't be doctors or software developers or engineers.

Also there's also the simple, but unsolved problem of people just unwilling to learn. You can't make the horse drink and all that.

[Qantourisc]

1) Do we implement 1 child per couple policy? This would work, until you run out of people.

2/3) Consider AI, what with all the STEMS ? Also, how many stems do we really need ?

4) As soon as everything is automated, capitalist "win the game". No money will flow back. You have to abandon this at some point.

4) What if the government runs out of money ? Same things that would happen now, increased taxes, or a bankrupt state. In a pure socialistic state this would translate in: you will have to do with less (not money, but luxuries).

[Xiol]

The answer is Basic Income.

Good luck getting anyone to take it seriously though.

[igf]

The answer is eugenics.

Good luck getting anyone to take that seriously though.

[MollyR]

Or genetic engineering via crispr and designer babies.

http://trendintech.com/2016/08/19/will-china-lead-us-into-a-...

[igf]

Well, I stick all that under the heading of eugenics anyway. I don't care how it's achieved, but we need better people.

[throwaway991199]

The answer is not basic income.

Look at this Graph for the US as an example.

http://www.cbpp.org/sites/default/files/styles/report_371px/...

Social Security 24% Health Care 25% Safety Net Programs 10% Benefits for Retirees 8%

Social programs according to this consist of 67% of the total budget.

Where is the money going to come from?

Also, you know what happened to France when they hiked up their Tax rates? They moved to London. Where did the Russians go? They moved to London. Where did the Greek millionaires/Billionaires go, probably London.

The rich in the US have already started making plans on where to go, there are a lot of places for them to live.

If you think Basic Income is going to be the solution. I'm very sorry to tell you. It's not!

[tonyedgecombe]

So a substantial portion of the US is already getting basic income, remove the progressive tax system and replace that with basic income and everybody gets it without spending any more.

[jedmeyers]

A lot of people don't feel that everyone should be getting an unconditional income.

[yks]

then a lot of people will try to run from the hungry mobs when time comes. or suppress them by force, redistributing their money to the force of course, so much for hard-earned income.

[tonyedgecombe]

True, and I think they are probably wrong.

[icebraining]

Also, you know what happened to France when they hiked up their Tax rates? They moved to London. Where did the Russians go? They moved to London. Where did the Greek millionaires/Billionaires go, probably London.

Expatriation tax (for existing wealth) plus sales tax (for new income). It doesn't matter where they live if the money is taxed at the source.

[Qantourisc]

If that is the case: beware of pitchforks in the long run.