[psi75]

If we don't implement universal basic income, we are utterly screwed.

Markets where one side is desperate are inelastic, which means that a small change in supply or demand can cause huge price swings. Usually, this works against those who are out of power; for example, oil producers can cause price spikes if they can hold a cartel together. The job market is also extremely inelastic. We might only see 10 or 20 percent of truck-driving jobs automated out of existence by 2032, but that will have devastating effects on wages.

The idea that this only threatens low- and middle-skill workers is also absurd. Look at programming. Agile Scrum has given managers the ability to replace those expensive, fussy high-skill experts with chain gangs of far less capable people who barely qualify as software engineers. If it can happen to software engineers, it can happen to anyone, and the broad-based effects on the labor market (collapses of one industry triggering refugee crises into other ones) are going to be horrible.

Anything you do as a subordinate can and will be automated, if not entirely, at least enough to make possible a massive wage cut. Of course, that's not a bad thing. On its own, it's the opposite. The problem is that the financial penalties associated with automation invariably go to the workers, and the benefits go only to capital.

We have about ten years left on the "if ya doesn't work, ya doesn't eat" model.

[ajafari1]

Thanks for reading my deep dive and your comment. If we zoom out to one year ago, most non AI-savvy people would have considered it preposterous that a graphics designer could become AI automated anytime soon. I believe, similar to you, that we are in the same position with software development becoming automated. Most tech people consider it preposterous right now, but watch it happen in the next couple years.

My point about the highly skilled creative workers retaining jobs is that they may have a year or two of lead time before they too get automated by the AI-job suite.

[stuckinhell]

I don't think Basic Income will save anything. I think its very likely creativity and consciousness are probably tied together.

We might be very well on the way to making humans beings as a whole obsolete. Non-expert Human Labor has been devalued by robotic automation, and now Human minds might be devalued by AI's.

[rendang]

Is there any historical precedent for a short term, big dive in the wages of a certain sector based on a 20% decline in demand for that labor? If that were the expected outcome, wouldn't one have predicted that the economy-wide declines in the workforce in the Great Recession would have sunk wages?

[psi75]

I don't know if the numbers match (e.g. 20%) but this is basically what happened in the Great Depression. The advent of industrial nitrogen fixation led to increased agricultural productivity, which caused food prices to decline, which seems like it should be a good thing, but led to the impoverishment of many farmers who could no longer compete.

The Great Recession did shrink wages, although for office workers it mostly produced permanent increases in work demands (Millennial nightmare jobs vs. cushy Boomer jobs which, by the way, won't be backfilled when those who hold them vacate) with wages merely flat.