[bastawhiz]

Minimum wage is orthogonal to many jobs that AI will replace, especially in medicine. If it's your job to diagnose illness from medical imagery, you probably make a good deal more than minimum wage but your job is very much in jeopardy. Truck drivers make three times minimum wage in many cases, and their jobs are going to disappear in only a few years. At past jobs, I've seen finance folks (with graduate degrees) have their jobs outsourced to overseas _data science teams_.

[randomdata]

The parent is referring to the how people cannot lower their wage (below the minimum) when automation starts competing against them. The truck driver may make three times minimum wage right now, but the truck driver will be prevented, by law, from offering to drive a truck for 1/3 minimum wage when driverless trucks cost 1/2 minimum wage to operate.

Humans may want to sharpen their pencils and outcompete automation on price, but are prevented from doing so. Robots never work for free. Capital, operational, and maintenance costs can be quite expensive. However, the cost of automation amortized on an hourly basis may be below the price of hiring someone at minimum wage. As such, humans are legally forced to find something else, or go without work entirely.

Given that automation has historically created far more jobs than it replaced, you can argue that it is good thing that people are forced into more useful roles by not allowing them to compete with machines. But if you believe that automation simply takes away jobs for good, as many people do, then minimum wage will actually result in even lower wages for these people than they would have without minimum wage.

[bastawhiz]

And my point is that what the minimum wage is doesn't matter anyway. You can't lower your minimum wage by law, but you also can't live on that, either. What does it matter if your salary is competitive with that of a machine if you can't afford food, shelter, or any other of life's necessities?

Minimum wage is, by all accounts, a success. It prevents employers from creating jobs that prevent a person from ever being successful. And we know that it's good and successful because we have the data to show that it does indeed raise the quality of living to a "barely first world" standard for many people. Seeing this on HN:

> not allowing people to have salaries competitively priced vs machines will cause most of the swift pain AI will bring.

is startling to me. Who does the OP think this person is that can live on $5/hr or lower? Minimum wage _as it is_ is arguably too low. It's sad that this illusion of "if you lower minimum wage, people will work for the lower wage" seems so pervasive, because it's thrown out as if minimum wage employees are trying to be competitive. If you've eaten twice in the last two days and you're about to lose your car, you'll work for almost anything if it means keeping your head above water for a couple more days. Minimum wage is a solution to a human problem, not a business problem. If a job can't be performed competitively for a survivable salary, employers shouldn't be allowed to say, "well if you don't mind not having heat in your home..." and should instead be forced to use automation. Yeah, it sucks being laid off, but there will always be more minimum wage jobs. If you take away minimum wage, now you're left with even fewer reasonable prospects of a job that pays a survivable wage.

[randyrand]

Simple solution to people dying of hunger, food shelters.

There are better alternatives to minimum wage that don't have the same problems with AI.

one example:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_income_tax

People think wanting to get rid of minimum wage is to be against helping poor people; it's actually the exact opposite. Being against minimum wage is to be against the problems it brings - not being against the poor.

[sova]

Too bad in the United States there is pretty much no chance for a NIT, so minimum wage is the closest we can get.

[randomdata]

> You can't lower your minimum wage by law, but you also can't live on that, either.

But, given the context of discussion, the only other alternative is to have no wage at all. Being able to buy some things allows you to live better than being able to buy no things. We're not talking about the real world where automation creates more jobs than it destroys, we're talking about a hypothetical world where your only choice is to go directly head-to-head with automation. You have no hope of winning if the law forces you to charge more than the competition.

> It prevents employers from creating jobs that prevent a person from ever being successful.

You're slightly off on that. Minimum wage prevents employees from competing against each other once the price reaches the defined minimum. It's to protect you from other workers, not the employer. Minimum wage exists precisely because people have proven over and over again that they will sharpen their pencils and figure out how to do job for less than you in order to get the job over you.

If there was nobody to undercut you, employers would be forced to pay you whatever you want. This is why software developers, who are limited in availability relative to the jobs available to them, are generally able to charge significantly larger amounts of money. Jobs at the minimum have such an overabundance of labour that they're all fighting for the limited number of spots, and thus there is always someone willing to work for less to get the job.

> Who does the OP think this person is that can live on $5/hr or lower? Minimum wage _as it is_ is arguably too low.

Although it seems kind of silly to compare the needs of our current situation to some hypothetical future where everything is automated. If humans were doing all the work that automation currently does today, the current minimum wage wouldn't just be arguably too low, it would be but a tiny fraction of what would be necessary to survive. Food, for instance, would easily be 10x more expensive than it is now if we didn't have all of the efficient automation keeping the costs down. Imagine trying to live on the current minimum wage while paying an order of magnitude more for your groceries. With automation taking over in this hypothetical future, the cost of living will have no relationship to what we're accustom to in this current reality.

[tigershark]

Do you really think that people can survive earning 1/3 of the minimum wage? They will be much better off just becoming beggars.

[randomdata]

Given the context of this thread, and not an alternative situation that I am sure you can dream up, yes: Mathematically, 1/3 of minimum wage is greater than the only alternative: No wage at all. Considering the scope presented, I am unconvinced that begging will be viable. It's already a struggle today, and would only become more difficult in the the situation presented.

I'm not convinced this hypothetical situation presented is realistic to start with, but that is well beyond the topic at hand. The constraints are what they are.

[randyrand]

Solution: Negative income tax and/or welfare.

[dmoo]

You could easily tax robot labor to ensure it wasn't competitive with cheap labour

[randomdata]

It is an interesting thought. How would the tax be implemented?

The automated dishwasher in my kitchen relieves human dishwashing services to the tune of an hour or two per week. Minimum wage where I live is $14/hr. That is, on the low end, a little over $700 per year. Would I be on the hook for the $700 each year, minus the current operating costs of the dishwasher, in order to have it operational in my home?

And should the taxed value be a straight up calculation like that? Humans are quirky and unreliable, and I may not be comfortable with having a stranger in my house to clean up after me. As such, I may be willing to pay quite a bit more to have the reliable and comfortable automation over hiring a human. Would the tax need to account for that disparity to allow humans to still have a competitive edge?