[pdonis]

> Whether or not work is done is completely orthogonal.

No, it's not, because food requires work to produce. Someone has to do that work.

If you yourself are not one of the people who works to produce the food that we all need, you have only two ways of getting it:

(1) Trade something else of value for it;

(2) Force the people who do produce it to give it to you.

Option #1 is a free market. Option #2 is tyranny. There are no other choices.

Which do you pick?

[bigstrat2003]

This is a false dichotomy, brother. People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less. Most humans aren't so cold hearted that they are ok with others starving. So no, the options aren't just "trade for food" or "force people to give you food".

[pdonis]

> People can, and do, pool their resources to give to those who have less.

Voluntarily, yes. If you want to make my list complete, you can add charity as a third option: if people judge that you're worth helping, they can voluntarily choose to help you.

But charity only works if the people doing it have things to give. Which means those things were produced. Somebody produced them. And the people who have them to give, through charity, got them one of the two ways I described. So it all still bottoms out to those two ways. Yes, some people can be helped out with charity. But you can't have an entire society all being helped with charity, because then nobody is producing anything that can be used to help them.

[mitthrowaway2]

Automation is the art of producing things without needing somebody to produce them.

[pdonis]

Not really. Automation is a tool that amplifies human productivity. It doesn't replace it--humans still have to be involved.

AI, it is claimed, will eventually make humans completely unnecessary in the production process. I'll believe it when I see it. AI is an automation tool--possibly a more sophisticated one than previous ones, but still a tool. It will still need humans to be involved.

[mitthrowaway2]

Even if you don't believe it, it's the basic premise of the article and the conversation that we're having about the "dead economy". You don't have to believe it in order to have a conversation about it as a hypothetical, and that's the conversation that is happening here.

So if full automation doesn't happen, we have the status quo, which everyone understands already. If it does happen and production decouples from human labor completely, how do we allocate the fruits of that production?

[pdonis]

> it's the basic premise of the article

Only with respect to some kinds of production. The article is talking about AI replacing "cognitive labor", which it defines rather vaguely. But, for example, the article does not seem to be claiming (nor are AI proponents claiming) that AI will be able to fix your car or your plumbing or your HVAC when it breaks, or cut your hair, or produce food, or many other things. So it is not talking about AI decoupling all forms of production from humans.

The article does then go on to talk as if the decoupling is for all forms of production, when it talks about the political crisis that would produce. But that just means the article is going way beyond its premise at that point.

There is a better and more realistic premise that the article briefly mentions, but then skates on by:

"[F]irms are deploying...“excessive automation,” using AI to kill jobs without generating significantly lower production costs, while imposing substantial social costs. The technology, in many applications, isn’t good enough to justify the displacement it causes."

In other words, a bubble, that takes up a large enough segment of the economy to cause a serious disruption when it pops. And the pop is not about allocation of what gets produced: it's about production crashing because of misallocation of capital. But the crash in production won't be in the sectors that produce material goods like food: as I said above, AI proponents aren't claiming that AI will decouple that from humans. The crash will be in sectors where a lot of the "value" produced is already questionable anyway. It will cause disruption because there are many people whose on-paper wealth is tied up in the notional value assigned to those things, which could evaporate overnight if it turns it that it was all a bubble and the bubble pops. But there's any easy way to avoid that: don't be one of those people. Or, if you can't avoid being exposed to that risk because of whatever particular area you work in, hedge against it by not having all of your wealth tied up in the notional valuations of those things. Which is a prudent thing to do anyway.

[tonyedgecombe]

Is it tyranny that my 84 year old parents get free food (via the state pension)?

[pdonis]

Did they earn the pension by working for many years?

[graemep]

Do you think they should be left to starve if they did not work for many years?

In most developed countries even someone who has been never worked in their life will get enough to live on (although they might get less than someone who has worked all their lives).

[pdonis]

> Do you think they should be left to starve if they did not work for many years?

I think that we need to be clear about what's going on. The post I originally responded to in this subthread (which was not by you) said that whether or not work is done is "completely orthogonal" to whether people starve to death. My point is that it is not: food has to be produced, so somebody has to do the work to produce it. The question you are asking, and the claim I was originally responding to, completely ignore that part of it, and only focus on the person who needs food, not the people who are producing it.

I'll take the US as an example. The US population is well over 300 million by now, but let's take 300 million as a round number. I think about 1 in 20 people in the US are involved in food production in some way. That means 15 million people in the US are producing food.

There are indeed a substantial number of people in the US who have never worked in their lives but who are being given at least some sort of income by the government. I'll take SSI as a rough proxy for that since it's explicitly for people who have no work history. From what I can gather, there are about 6 million people in the US on SSI. That's about 2 people in 1000.

(Of course, we produce many more things than food. But food is the focus of this subthread, so that's what I'll talk about.)

So if 2 people in 1000 are on SSI, i.e., are getting fed at taxpayer expense without ever having worked in their lives, then about 2 in 1000 of the 15 million people producing food in the US, or about 30,000 people, are working to produce the food that those people in SSI eat. So 30,000 people are producing food for 6 million--the same 1 to 20 ratio we saw before.

At this level, of course, it seems obvious that this is not a serious problem. The 30,000 people producing food for the 6 million SSI recipients are getting paid, they're just getting paid by the taxpayers in this case instead of the people consuming the food. (We'll leave aside all the issues about whether they get paid a fair price, the various perverse incentives at work in the US food production system, etc., since those apply to all of us, not just those on SSI.)

But still, it's important to recognize that there are 30,000 people producing food in the US for people who produce nothing in return. We can say that's a small enough number that we can deal with it, and I don't disagree; we as a society have decided that we can afford to support 0.2 percent of us that way, and that's fine. But it's tempting to just round that number to zero, as if the food the SSI recipients eat just appeared by magic, for free, without anyone having to work to produce it. And that temptation needs to be resisted.

Why does it need to be resisted? Because the intuitive sense that "we can afford it" does not scale. We can afford it at 2 people per 1,000. That doesn't mean we can afford it if that percentage goes up. Nor does it mean we can afford it if we keep adding more and more things to the government's largesse, and not just for people who have never worked and can't work.

[pdonis]

Oops, two of my numbers were off by an order of magnitude: 6 million is 2 in 100, not 2 in 1000, and there are 300,000 people producing food for those 6 million, not 30,000.

[tonyedgecombe]

Not really. Their generation never paid enough to cover what they receive now.

[pdonis]

Was the pension supposed to be their entire support in retirement? Or were they expected to also put by additional retirement savings on their own? (Note, for example, that the US Social Security system is only supposed to provide about 40% of a retiree's expected necessary income in retirement.)

[_DeadFred_]

If you don't feed people, they will pick for you.

The real question is do we figure it out with intention now, or let it be randomly figured out by people with nothing to lose?

[pdonis]

> If you don't feed people, they will pick for you.

Do you mean they will pick option 2? "Give me food or I'll mess you up?" We have a name for that kind of behavior, and it's not a pretty one.

Or might there be some possibility that they will realize that option 1 is there and try it?

[_DeadFred_]

If my family isn't eating and society is cool with that I could not care less about a label that such a society gives me.

Again, society can get ahead of things, or let it be decided later. The harder you make option 2, the more people will pick option 1. Society can figure out how to keep option 2 working if society prefers that. If society fails to do so it will deservedly get option 1.

[pdonis]

> The harder you make option 2, the more people will pick option 1.

I think you have the options mixed up. Option 1 is voluntary trade. Option 2 is violence.

You appear to be saying that people would prefer voluntary trade, but that they will resort to violence if they see no other option. Which historically I think is largely true.

[_DeadFred_]

Option one is always violence. It is the only option always on the table.

[ffaccount2]

I am shocked you think letting people starve is OK. The word you are looking for is "revolution" or "uprising" - people will fight for the right to live if you deny them food.

[pdonis]

> I am shocked you think letting people starve is OK.

I never said any such thing.

> The word you are looking for is "revolution" or "uprising" - people will fight for the right to live if you deny them food.

In other words, you're saying people will choose option #2.

[Starman_Jones]

What an odd response given the scenario put forth. I’m very curious what you think that starving people with no jobs are expected to trade with here?