United States California approves 1st state-funded guaranteed income plan

[Doomsought]

What 3d printing has replaces is not the injection mold, which creates multiple parts in 30 to 70 seconds, but rather the process of carving a part in a soft material such as wax or clay, then making a plaster cast of the part, then using that cast to shape your final material. A multi hour long process done by hand.

 

[Bear Ribs]

It's not a strawman, it's part of why things won't work the way you think.

A robot used for manufacturing strictly adds value to the economy. I'd say it's a producer, but not a consumer, unlike a human being, but it's not even that. It's a tool, which enhances the production of human beings.

The fact that a robot has taken over a job a human used to do, does not cause there to be less value, less wealth in the economy. And in anything approaching a free market economy, wealth doesn't just sit around doing nothing; it is used and spent, so the wealth that used to be spent paying one worker, is now freed up to pay for a different worker.

Again, all your strawman. Nobody said robots don't add value, nobody said robots don't produce.

And robots will not be doing all the work. This is, simply put, a baseless assertion, with no supporting evidence beyond speculation about the future. History has shown us time and again, that no matter how many jobs are eliminated because of better methodologies and machines, we always find something new to do with the freed up resources, and that something new, means new jobs. If those jobs are also highly mechanized and efficient, that means that there are still more resources floating around, available to make more new things.

But they will not make new things for random poor people unless there's money in it for the people who own the robots, such as if the poor are given a UBI in order to buy the production of robots.

Let me illustrate the problem with your "All of history" argument.

Allosaurus lived 150 million years ago.
Tyrannosaurus lived 65 million years ago.
Humans lived 1 million years ago.

Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus are further apart than Tyrannosaurus and humans. So just going off "history," we see that large therapods should be the apex of apex predators. They're not because, sometimes, history doesn't perfectly repeat itself. Sometimes things go extinct.

The people of 1700 didn't imagine that trains would make ox-pulled wagons largely obsolete. The people of 1800 didn't imagine that the car would make the carriage a niche luxury good. The people of 1900 didn't imagine that aircraft would make passenger-carrying ships functionally exclusive to luxury cruises. The people of 1950 didn't imagine that calculators would mean that engineers trained fifty years later wouldn't recognize a slide-rule on sight, if they even knew what it was in the first place.

Yet every single time, every single time without exception, the fact that there is a machine that does part or all of a job better, has just mean new jobs with new things that never even existed before came about.

That's an excellent series of points, actually. The car replaced the horse and buggy. How did that go for the horse? Not so many around anymore and the only ones are largely pets?

You see that's the difference you're missing here. Internal combustion engines replaced the horse, and now horses are rare and used only as pets and entertainment. Aircraft replaced ships, and now passenger ships are rare and used only as entertainment. A self-driving car doesn't replace the car, it replaces the human driver. What does your history say happens next?

Yes, yes, I've heard the argument that 'not everyone can be an engineer or a physicist.' Yes, that's fine. You don't need an IQ of 120, or even 100 (though below 90 is probably pushing it) to have practical hands-on understanding of what it means to be a mechanic, or a plumber, or a carpenter. You don't need to be a genius to have specific specialized knowledge in how to operate a couple types of heavy machinery, like a logging machine, or a front-end loader. And there are continuously more jobs for luxury goods and services being created, because as necessities become cheaper, people can afford more luxuries.

Dude, <90 IQ is over a quarter of the human population. You've just pretty much emptied a mag into your entire argument's foot by admitting that at least one in four people are going to be unable to ever work, even in your own most optimistic scenarios.

And of course, again you base a major portion of your argument on fabrications and falsehood. Necessities haven't become cheaper. In fact, the cost of basic necessities has steadily outstripped inflation for the last 30 years. Meanwhile, over the same period, somehow real wages adjusted for inflation have not increased.

It's almost like the steady march of automation and its effects on the average person have already been visible for quite some time.

Thirty years ago The Simpsons began. It was considered reasonable then that Homer Simpson, a lazy man well below average in intelligence and only a high school diploma, could support a family of 5 on just his single job paycheck with his wife not working. Today, that's the most outlandish thing in the show.

Even necessities like housing that remain expensive, have more luxuries built right into them.

This also does not account for the fact that the IQ scale has been repeatedly recalibrated higher. 100 is always the average, so if the average intelligence rises, then they shift the scale upwards. Odds are decent (but by no means certain) that this will happen again in the future.

Actually just the opposite. They've been having to recalibrate the tests downwards as people in many developed nations seem to be losing IQ points.

A long-term rise and recent decline in intelligence test performance: The Flynn Effect in reverse

In the 1980s reviewed evidence indicated that, through the preceding decades of the last century, population performance on intelligence tests had bee…

www.sciencedirect.com

A reversal of the Flynn effect for spatial perception in German-speaking countries: Evidence from a cross-temporal IRT-based meta-analysis (1977–2014)

Generational IQ changes (the Flynn effect) have been shown to be predominantly positive but differentiated according to IQ domains and countries. Howe…

www.sciencedirect.com

Flynn effect and its reversal are both environmentally caused

Using administrative register data with information on family relationships and cognitive ability for three decades of Norwegian male birth cohorts, we show that the increase, turning point, and decline of the Flynn effect can be recovered from within-family ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

And as to the argument about machine learning? Let me share something with you:

https://i.pinimg.com/564x/b1/e4/34/b1e434cd06d68247ee51b6ed00c1f447.jpg

After decades and decades of AI development, while some pattern recognition has been managed, a basic reading of things like this will show you that AI does not do well with meaning. It can be taught the strict rules of grammar. It can be taught many of the weird exceptions and irregularities built in English. That doesn't mean that it can teach itself why you can't 'switch a child to airplane mode.' Exhaustive and highly-detailed programming work from specialists may be able to manually teach it a lot of the things about what a child is and isn't, but it can't teach that to itself.

As Doomsought said, you can create and program a machine for highly specialized tasks, but it's very difficult to implement, and each use-case requires different specialization. People thought self-aware robots were around the corner in the 80's (and some decades further back), but that continuously fails to materialize, because human thought is more advanced and sophisticated than almost anyone understands.

And that's the kind of barrier you need before humans can be outright replaced, rather than just given better economic tools, by robots as a whole.

Given the nature of Moore's Law, that day is coming fast. But today, it can start driving a car, which is bad news for anybody whose only salable skill is driving.

 

[LordsFire]

Again, all your strawman. Nobody said robots don't add value, nobody said robots don't produce.

I hadn't known that they had to recalibrate the IQ scale down again, so you've got a fair point one me there.

As to the rest of it though, it's mostly irrelevant, or you're making false equivalencies. A horse is not a human. What happened prior to the rise of civilization with dinosaurs and only has relevance to the field of economics, in that their deaths were related to providing fossil fuels for us to use now.


Can you give one historical example, just one, of where improved production technology has resulted in permanent mass unemployment? Just one?

Because I can give you an example of what happens when you take entire social classes and turn them into permanent intergenerational wealth dependents: The Fall of Rome.

They just did it with slaves instead of robots.

 

[Terthna]

I hadn't known that they had to recalibrate the IQ scale down again, so you've got a fair point one me there.

As to the rest of it though, it's mostly irrelevant, or you're making false equivalencies. A horse is not a human. What happened prior to the rise of civilization with dinosaurs and only has relevance to the field of economics, in that their deaths were related to providing fossil fuels for us to use now.


Can you give one historical example, just one, of where improved production technology has resulted in permanent mass unemployment? Just one?

Because I can give you an example of what happens when you take entire social classes and turn them into permanent intergenerational wealth dependents: The Fall of Rome.

They just did it with slaves instead of robots.

Okay; a little over 3.6 million people in the United States are employed in the transportation industry, whereas around 3.2 million are retail sales people, and 3.1 million are cashiers. Assuming most of those jobs are automated, which is not out of the question, where exactly are all those people supposed to find work? We already have about 10 million people we can't employ, and these are far from the only jobs that are about to become obsolete.

 

[LordsFire]

Okay; a little over 3.6 million people in the United States are employed in the transportation industry, whereas around 3.2 million are retail sales people, and 3.1 million are cashiers. Assuming most of those jobs are automated, which is not out of the question, where exactly are all those people supposed to find work? We already have about 10 million people we can't employ, and these are far from the only jobs that are about to become obsolete.

What will we do when 90% of all jobs (farming) become obsolete due to tractors, combine harvesters, and other machine tools?

What will we do when assembly lines become more efficient, and less employees are needed to do the same work?

Oh wait, these things already happened.

And specifically with cashiers, large box stores have been moving towards automation for a decade or more, with self-checkouts. They use what, a third or less the number of cashiers that they used to, because it's more time-efficient (and cheaper) for people to use the self-checkout?

And yet that hasn't magically resulted in the people who used to be cashiers becoming permanently unemployed.


Over the last two decades, an entire industry (analogue cameras and film development shops) have basically gone extinct. You can still find niche uses of chemical film, but functionally everything is digital. You used to go to a business that would sell film, and develop it for you when you brought in the roll of used film. Those businesses basically no longer exist.

Yet, somehow, despite literally an entire market sector no longer existing, that hasn't resulted in permanent unemployment. Do you think that in 1980, Nikon or the like thought that their business model would become obsolete, because of the existence of digital cameras? Do you think that the earliest photogrophers in the 1800's thought that?

They probably didn't even imagine the existence of digital cameras, much less that a digital camera would become ubiquitously unified to a portable version of a telephone that operated on battery power and communicated wirelessly via radio waves. Yet jobs that people hadn't even imagined, now existed.

This has always, every time, and without exception happened when old business models were rendered obsolete by technology.

You know what the one sure-fire way to guarantee functionally permanent unemployment has been? Government subsidization of unemployment. It happened in Rome, it's happened in the US once the 'war on poverty' was started, and if we broaden the program to cover everyone, it'll happen again.

You are not the first people to predict that this new technology would ruin society and the economy. Every single person who predicted this has been wrong, and the reasons they were wrong have not changed. Every time that people have tried to create permanent classes of welfare surfs, that has been societally ruinous, and the reasons for that have not changed.

You, and everyone else who supports BLS/UBI, are literally proposing a 'solution' that will cause the very problem that it proposes to solve.

 

[Doomsought]

What will we do when assembly lines become more efficient, and less employees are needed to do the same work?

Never, an assebly line employee will always be smaller, less expensive and more flexable than a robot.
Fixing an employee that was mistrained just takes a supervisor yelling at them a few times.
Fixing a robot that has been mistrained is a million dollar software project.

 

[LordsFire]

Never, an assebly line employee will always be smaller, less expensive and more flexable than a robot.
Fixing an employee that was mistrained just takes a supervisor yelling at them a few times.
Fixing a robot that has been mistrained is a million dollar software project.

I think you misunderstand. Better manually-operated machine tools already have made assembly lines more efficient, and require less manpower for the same amount of product, or generate more product for the same amount of manpower.

I'm not saying 'magically we will no longer need human labor,' I'm saying 'incremental improvements are a proven thing.'

 

[boomghost]

I think you misunderstand. Better manually-operated machine tools already have made assembly lines more efficient, and require less manpower for the same amount of product, or generate more product for the same amount of manpower.

I'm not saying 'magically we will no longer need human labor,' I'm saying 'incremental improvements are a proven thing.'

personally I think its a combined issue of both automation and massive population increase is driving wages down due to how large the supply of workers is, which is why we've gone from single income families like the simpsons showed back in the day, to the current situation where double income families struggle to make ends meet in a small house/apartment

 

[LordsFire]

personally I think its a combined issue of both automation and massive population increase is driving wages down due to how large the supply of workers is, which is why we've gone from single income families like the simpsons showed back in the day, to the current situation where double income families struggle to make ends meet in a small house/apartment

It's not population growth; the population growth rate post-1980 compared to the 1950-1980 period was much higher. One major part of it is the normalization of women working full-time; if you double the availability of labor, that certainly has an effect on the balance point between supply and demand.

A further effect is the welfare state. Trillions of dollars of value have gone to paying people not to do anything, which means that you're lowering the available value to pay people who do work, which has also depressed effective wages.

There's a variety of other effects going into it, but one of the least socially-acceptable for people to talk about, is the fact that most (not all) long-term and intergenerationally poor families tend to have very poor fiscal habits.

 

[boomghost]

It's not population growth; the population growth rate post-1980 compared to the 1950-1980 period was much higher. One major part of it is the normalization of women working full-time; if you double the availability of labor, that certainly has an effect on the balance point between supply and demand.

A further effect is the welfare state. Trillions of dollars of value have gone to paying people not to do anything, which means that you're lowering the available value to pay people who do work, which has also depressed effective wages.

There's a variety of other effects going into it, but one of the least socially-acceptable for people to talk about, is the fact that most (not all) long-term and intergenerationally poor families tend to have very poor fiscal habits.

well, as Covid showed with the unemployment payments to so many, once people realize they get paid more to do their best to game the system and stay unemployed, they wonder whats the point of working hard when they live so much better dodging work.

 

[Terthna]

What will we do when 90% of all jobs (farming) become obsolete due to tractors, combine harvesters, and other machine tools?

What will we do when assembly lines become more efficient, and less employees are needed to do the same work?

Oh wait, these things already happened.

And specifically with cashiers, large box stores have been moving towards automation for a decade or more, with self-checkouts. They use what, a third or less the number of cashiers that they used to, because it's more time-efficient (and cheaper) for people to use the self-checkout?

And yet that hasn't magically resulted in the people who used to be cashiers becoming permanently unemployed.


Over the last two decades, an entire industry (analogue cameras and film development shops) have basically gone extinct. You can still find niche uses of chemical film, but functionally everything is digital. You used to go to a business that would sell film, and develop it for you when you brought in the roll of used film. Those businesses basically no longer exist.

Yet, somehow, despite literally an entire market sector no longer existing, that hasn't resulted in permanent unemployment. Do you think that in 1980, Nikon or the like thought that their business model would become obsolete, because of the existence of digital cameras? Do you think that the earliest photogrophers in the 1800's thought that?

They probably didn't even imagine the existence of digital cameras, much less that a digital camera would become ubiquitously unified to a portable version of a telephone that operated on battery power and communicated wirelessly via radio waves. Yet jobs that people hadn't even imagined, now existed.

This has always, every time, and without exception happened when old business models were rendered obsolete by technology.

You know what the one sure-fire way to guarantee functionally permanent unemployment has been? Government subsidization of unemployment. It happened in Rome, it's happened in the US once the 'war on poverty' was started, and if we broaden the program to cover everyone, it'll happen again.

You are not the first people to predict that this new technology would ruin society and the economy. Every single person who predicted this has been wrong, and the reasons they were wrong have not changed. Every time that people have tried to create permanent classes of welfare surfs, that has been societally ruinous, and the reasons for that have not changed.

You, and everyone else who supports BLS/UBI, are literally proposing a 'solution' that will cause the very problem that it proposes to solve.

You didn't answer my question; what jobs, specifically, are those people going to find after their current ones are rendered obsolete? We're not talking about an entire industry going extinct; we're talking about dozens of the largest and most widely employing industries going from employing millions, to employing thousands. There's a difference between rendering a product obsolete, and rendering labor obsolete.

Also, I'm arguing in favor of a UBI as a better alternative to the welfare system we already have; one that is cheaper and has far less perverse incentives. The whole post-scarcity thing is a separate argument, in my eyes. You can argue it will never happen; but it's ultimately irrelevant.

Never, an assebly line employee will always be smaller, less expensive and more flexable than a robot.
Fixing an employee that was mistrained just takes a supervisor yelling at them a few times.
Fixing a robot that has been mistrained is a million dollar software project.

Always? So we're locked at our current level of technological development; is that what you're saying?

 

[Doomsought]

Always? So we're locked at our current level of technological development; is that what you're saying?

just like flying cars, this is not a technology problem, it is an application problem. We've had flying cars since the '40s. They are called helicopters.

 

[Terthna]

just like flying cars, this is not a technology problem, it is an application problem. We've had flying cars since the '40s. They are called helicopters.

That's a terrible analogy that has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation at hand.

 

[Doomsought]

That's a terrible analogy that has absolutely nothing to do with the conversation at hand.

No, it is a precisely accurate analogy. A technology can't be used for something it is promised for because of the circumstances of that usage that can never be altered by improvements to the technology.

 

[LordsFire]

You didn't answer my question; what jobs, specifically, are those people going to find after their current ones are rendered obsolete? We're not talking about an entire industry going extinct; we're talking about dozens of the largest and most widely employing industries going from employing millions, to employing thousands. There's a difference between rendering a product obsolete, and rendering labor obsolete.

Also, I'm arguing in favor of a UBI as a better alternative to the welfare system we already have; one that is cheaper and has far less perverse incentives. The whole post-scarcity thing is a separate argument, in my eyes. You can argue it will never happen; but it's ultimately irrelevant.

You appear to have completely missed the point of my post.

New jobs that we have not yet invented. What specific jobs? I could tell you what some will be around the edges, but for the most part I don't know.

Why don't I know? For the same reason that a novelist in the 1920's couldn't tell you about the future boom industry of software development. The concept didn't even exist yet, because the technology to do it with. Just as a novelist in the 1820's couldn't tell you about the future boom industry of auto mechanic, or the 1720's novelist tell you about the future boom industry in railroads, etc, etc, etc.

So that's your answer to what jobs people will work: Jobs that haven't been invented yet. Just like every time in the last 200 years that an entire economic sector has been either wiped out (like typewriter manufacture) or reduced to employing less than a tenth of the workforce it used to (like food production).

Economic behavior is based on principles governed by human psychology and physical reality regarding resources, and how to extract and process them. AI and automation are efficiency improvers, nothing more, and nothing less. We've seen what happens when a new efficiency improver is implemented, and what happens when you create a permanent class of welfare serfs.

You aren't the first to predict that some new technology will bring some kind of ruin. Hell, I sometimes listen to an old BBC radio comedy called the Goon Show, that was broadcasting in the 1950's, and they were making jokes about doom-and-gloomers predicting ruin because of new technology back then.

Every single prediction of such has been wrong. Instead of permanent disablement, we instead see what is best described as 'growing pains,' as those currently working in a field that is becoming obsolete, have to find something new to do with themselves and develop new usable skills.

The entire argument that BLS/UBI will be 'needed' is based on an insistence that 'this time, this time, it will be different! We aren't like all the other people who made these kinds of predictions before!' And all there is to support that insistence is speculation.

We don't make drastic changes to how society is run based on speculation. Especially when past experience shows us that the consequences of those kinds of changes is exactly the permanent unemployment it's supposed to prevent, as well as gradual social decay, and then collapse.

 

[Terthna]

No, it is a precisely accurate analogy. A technology can't be used for something it is promised for because of the circumstances of that usage that can never be altered by improvements to the technology.

Helicopters are not flying cars; and flying cars never became a thing because they are a work of fiction that ignorant people just assumed would eventually become commonplace. Automation, meanwhile, is a thing that already exists and is constantly improving. To argue that the "circumstances of its usage" will never change is simply asinine; because it already has. Multiple times, in fact; or are you seriously going to argue that the machines of today aren't capable of doing things that the machines of fifty years ago were not?

 

[Bear Ribs]

As to the rest of it though, it's mostly irrelevant, or you're making false equivalencies. A horse is not a human. What happened prior to the rise of civilization with dinosaurs and only has relevance to the field of economics, in that their deaths were related to providing fossil fuels for us to use now.

The significant part here is that the horse was a component in transport, specifically motive power, and when that component was replaced horses became useless and were reduced to pets. Humans were not affected because the part of the transport they represented, steering and control, was not replaced. Now the human component, steering and control, is being replaced while we watch.

"A horse is not a human" is a pointless objection. An AI is not a human either.

Can you give one historical example, just one, of where improved production technology has resulted in permanent mass unemployment? Just one?

You've already been given examples in this thread, specifically how things are going down right now. @DarthOne presented a vid that pointed out how the increase in jobs and hours of work is not keeping up with growth in population anymore and hasn't been for some time. Real wages have not kept pace with inflation since the 70s. Basic necessities have become more expensive, inflation-adjusted, and have been getting more expensive for decades. Thirty years ago Homer Simpson, stupid, lazy, and with no college degree, was seen as reasonably able to support a family of five and own his own suburban home. Today that would be considered ridiculous.

Since you missed the point of the dinosaur analogy let me present you with a different one. Can you give one historical example, just one, of where a human being walked on a different planet than earth? Just one?

If not do you believe that it's physically impossible for humans to ever set foot on another planet, say Mars, because it has not happened before? Or do you accept that, actually, as technology advances things that haven't happened before in history can happen?

 

[Doomsought]

Helicopters are not flying cars; and flying cars never became a thing because they are a work of fiction that ignorant people just assumed would eventually become commonplace. Automation, meanwhile, is a thing that already exists and is constantly improving.

No, a helicopter is a flying car. The only difference between a helecopter and what people think a flying car would be is the form factor. It is a personal aircraft that you can land at your home and use to go to work everyday.

The problem is that you can not use it to replace the car because of the limitation on the usage of the helecopter: the logistics of moving it from place to place, the complication of its operation, the expense of making one, that you cannot use it in bad weather.

It doesn't matter what a machine can do if people cannot use them. That is why we do not use flying cars or jet packs. This same principle applies to automation. The technology has specific traits that you cannot remove by magically waving more science at it. It is an intrinsic part of the tool, just like how you need to be a flying car cannot escape the fact that it is an aircraft.

The more automation you use, the more you must materials, design and debugging you must invest before you ever sell a single product. This is a fundamentally expensive process because it requires an engineer whom is both competent and educated in a very specific manner to make the machines. There is also a fundamental trade off between automation and flexibility: Automation is fundamentally a result of the process of creating more specialized tools to perform a task. It is specificity that allows automation to be fast and unattended. A vast majority of automation technologies are machines that perform one task ever. A machine that makes links in a chain cannot do anything else.

 

[Terthna]

No, a helicopter is a flying car. The only difference between a helecopter and what people think a flying car would be is the form factor. It is a personal aircraft that you can land at your home and use to go to work everyday.

The problem is that you can not use it to replace the car because of the limitation on the usage of the helecopter: the logistics of moving it from place to place, the complication of its operation, the expense of making one, that you cannot use it in bad weather.

It doesn't matter what a machine can do if people cannot use them. That is why we do not use flying cars or jet packs. This same principle applies to automation. The technology has specific traits that you cannot remove by magically waving more science at it. It is an intrinsic part of the tool, just like how you need to be a flying car cannot escape the fact that it is an aircraft.

The more automation you use, the more you must materials, design and debugging you must invest before you ever sell a single product. This is a fundamentally expensive process because it requires an engineer whom is both competent and educated in a very specific manner to make the machines. There is also a fundamental trade off between automation and flexibility: Automation is fundamentally a result of the process of creating more specialized tools to perform a task. It is specificity that allows automation to be fast and unattended. A vast majority of automation technologies are machines that perform one task ever. A machine that makes links in a chain cannot do anything else.

You seem to be locked into the perspective that automation can only happen on the assembly line; which is an extremely narrow mindset. Yes, machines that makes links in a chain cannot do anything else, you're not wrong about that; but that's far from the only thing that can be automated. The two main obstacles standing in the way of widespread automation are that the technology hasn't matured yet, and that people stay competitive by accepting less and less pay to do the same amount of work. The former won't remain true forever, and the latter runs into the issue that eventually the pay will be so low, it just won't be worth it anymore.

 

[Aaron Fox]

Yeah, people forget this little thing called the technological context actually exists. This little tidbit gets overlooked that people don't see what is actually happening. The technological context is what made slavery considered outright evil despite it being a thing for millennia and perfectly acceptable beforehand, all of which were erased when the technological context shifted to make it useless.

The technological context has been shifting again, and rather radical compared to previous shifts. This is what many people on this very forum -apparently- can't comprehend. Rights and freedoms are wholly dependent on the technological context and when they shift, rights and freedoms shift with it. Now? That technological shift is essentially going to make us unable to work because we can't even hope to compete against machines. It is this technological shift that also makes privacy, well, fail-deadly instead of fail-safe (you can thank Moore's Law being applied to biotech with that one... and since the price tag and actual serious education requirements are decreasing... have fun with those implications). So on and so forth.