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

[Typhonis]

I wonder how long it will be before some business realizes they don't need a CEO that makes 7 figures a year and that they can outsource the job to a machine for pennies on the dollar?

 

[Bear Ribs]

No, we've been exploring that primarily through more advanced technology making labor more efficient.

Education fills a head with knowledge, some of which might be false. It has its use, but better tools and actual work experience are what improve 'how well humans can accomplish things.'

It's less durable, less flexible, and only capable of finer manipulation after enormous investments of man-hours and finances to make it so.

AI is less durable? I guess that's why we sent manned missions to mars and couldn't land a rover there.

The thing about your upfront costs of investments is, those investments have been made. We have robots that can do backflips and cartwheels, carry and load boxes, and run faster than a human all in one neat package. Now that we're there, we need to be able to deal with the ramifications.

Using current transistor-based technology, AI will never be more adaptable, because the fundamental nature of how AI 'thought' operates compared to human thought sticks them with fundamental limitations they cannot overcome. They can operate faster in specialized math-based tasks, and in that specific way be more intelligent, but easy grasp and understanding of concepts is something that is not possible based on current technology.

Now, if a completely new type of computing is invented, we may get computers capable of doing such. But the alternative to the transistor to base that off of doesn't even exist yet, much less having been developed into a mature technology capable of surpassing human thought.

This is not a catch-22 for me, this is a catch-22 for you.

I can and have pointed out the entire history of the first world over the last 200 years as evidence that new technology doesn't result in permanent unemployment. You can't point to any piece of new technology that has, and now you're actually claiming that it's impossible to do so?

When you start claiming that it is impossible for the key evidence supporting your argument to exist, you're in a bad place.

@DarthOne already supplied the proof, as I've already pointed out. I presume you keep ignoring that bit because you can't BS your way around it. I didn't claim it's impossible to exist, we already know that jobs aren't keeping up with population growth. I pointed out that the extremely narrow bit you're demanding that we can prove this one statistical group specifically remained unemployed long term, can't be had because if people stay unemployed long term the nation quits counting them as unemployed and will drop them off the lists.

We can, however, absolutely show that job creation is not keeping up with population growth even in our current demographic crisis of slowing birth rates, which proves the same thing as long as we don't ask for your super-narrow edge case.

Yes, things change due to technology. Human nature does not, and it is human nature which governs economics, because humans are those who are at base responsible for both production, and consumption. The details change, and some of those details are very important, but a machine is never going to earn a paycheck, go home, pay rent, and then buy food and/or luxuries.

Well gosh, would you look at that. There's a direct relationship between how expensive a thing has proportionately become, and how much the government has intervened with and distorted the market for that good or service.

So you're going to make a BS response rather than concede you were incorrect when you claimed necessities were cheaper now? Because you did say that, I proved it wrong, and you're deflecting onto government intervention instead of manning up.

It's almost like more government intervention makes things worse, not better.

This is such bullshit I don't even know how to respond.

You want some cites? I'll give you some cites.

1. I am staying in a 3-bedroom (the third is small, so let's call it a 2.5 bedroom) apartment, the monthly rent is 830 dollars a month. If I paid for that myself, rather than splitting it with one roommate, I could still afford it on a single full-time job at minimum wage. That's not possible for everyone though, so let's look at some actual numbers.

2. Let's look at rental rates in some non-crazy cities around the nation:
Top two listings in Superior, WI, ~800 a month for 2 bedroom, 1 bath.
~850-1200 a month in Cheyenne, WY, for 2 bedroom, 1 bath.
800-1200 a month in Grand Rapids, MI, though you have to scroll down a ways to get past the expensive stuff at the top of the listings.
Here I actually had to start sorting for cheap stuff; Atlanta, GA, 800-1200 for a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom.
I know from personal experience that if you're actively looking for a cheap part of the country to live in, you can do so for considerably less.

All located in areas with terrible weather that humans don't like living in, I'll note. Of course, you're also cherry-picking your data tremendously. How?

Superior Wisconsin: 33% below US average housing cost, but because everything else there is so much more expensive than average, the actual cost of living is 94% of average so not actually much savings. Meanwhile, crime is 81% higher than the national average. Average income is 20% lower than the national average, 23,805 per capita. And of course, you'd have to live with Wisconsin weather which isn't all that pleasant.

Cost Of Living in Superior, WI

Cost of living in Superior, WI is 94, compared to the national average of 100. See a full report that includes the average cost of groceries, goods and services, health care, housing and utilities.

www.areavibes.com

All your other cities are similar, areas with horrible weather, high crime rates, low wages, and low houses but high everything else. Grand Rapids has freaking 27% unemployment and a violent crime rate 68% higher than average, and everything that isn't a house is so expensive you wind up with 89% of average living expenses... wages meanwhile are so low the average person in Grand Rapids earns only 73% of the national average. You might as well talk about how there're very affordable houses in Detroit, it'd be more honest than what you're doing here because we can more reasonably expect most readers to know what a hellsphincter Detroit is.

3. Let's look at food costs. Let's start with an easily-findable list of groceries that'll get you through a week at a decent price. This outta do it. Granted, it's based on 2016 grocery prices, so let's generously slap 20% inflation on that, and say it's 24$ a week, instead of 20. Multiply by 4 for a family of 4 (closest to average American family size), and that's 100 dollars a week. Four and a half weeks in a month, and even though we've rounded up at every stage, we're still coming out to ~450 dollars a month.

We're now up to 1250-1700 or so a month.

4. A car. You can get one as low as 1500$ but I wouldn't recommend going under 3 grand unless you already know the seller and/or the car. Split that up into something spread out by 12 months, and you have 250$. Add insurance, which in Michigan runs around 300$ for six months, and Michigan is one of the most expensive states in the union for car insurance (mine dropped by 60% when I moved out of the state), and you're up to 300 a month. Tack on another 100 a month for gas and minor repairs.

1650-2100 a month in living expenses.

5. Medical treatment. This is an incredibly volatile thing. If your have good genes, don't take stupid risks, and don't have terrible luck, this could be as low as a couple hundred per person per year. One major medical expense though, can run from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and aside from not deliberately doing stupid things, there's very little one can do to control that. For most people though, in their younger and healthier years, the low end of costs is the norm. If we call it 300$ per person per year (which is much more than I generally spend myself, but I'm deliberately erring high), then that's 1200 for the family of four, or another 100 per month.

6. Cell Phone/internet service. This'll run you another 100-200$ a month for a family plan, generally speaking.

This brings us up to 1950-2400 a month.

This brings together bare-bones essential costs, though I did forget to count utilities with rent, for places where that is not included. Based on past experiences, that'd probably run 200-300 a month for a family of four, though bringing our total up to 2250-2700 a month.

Now, what's the income at Federal minimum wage? 7.25 per hour. If we had two parents working full-time at minimum-wage jobs, that's 80 hours a week, or 580 per week, coming to 2320 per month, which is barely enough to scrape by at the bottom end of the spectrum. 1160 dollars personal income per month is enough to live on by yourself, if you're smart, but two incomes at that level is hard for a family to get by on. It's only 29,000 a year, assuming both parents take two weeks worth of time off over the course of the year.

This is a real financial problem for this poor family, but let's look at some expanded statistics...

How much of the labor force is earning minimum wage (or less)? 1.9% a of 2019.

Boy, that really changes the picture now, doesn't it?

Just move up to the 9 or 10 dollar minimum wage common in many states, and you easily exceed the 2700 monthly cost estimate. That's still a really tight budget, but it is livable.

Now, let's look at the situation that you claimed, two college graduates working full-time to keep living in a small apartment. Now, what is the average starting salary of a college graduate?

$53,889 a year, according to one of the top results I found on a quick search. (Granted, I bet they're excluding a lot of graduates with completely useless degrees from their results, but its those graduates own fault for pursuing useless degrees, so they're not terribly germane to this discussion. If they are included in these results, then college graduates are doing way better than 54k a year once they stop dragging the average down.)

Wow. That really changes the picture, doesn't it? That's almost twice what the two minimum-wage earners brought in together. Obviously an average isn't going to account for everyone, but if that's your average, anything approaching a normal distribution is going to mean that a vanishingly low number of people have as low an income by themselves as two minimum wage earners would have together.

And if you put two of these average earners together, you have enough income to live on twice this calculated minimum living expense, leaving plenty of funds for paying off student loans and saving for the future.

So, to sum up, your assertion that the cost of living is so high that college graduates can barely make it on two incomes, is complete nonsense from beginning to end.

In fact, only the 1.9% or so of people earning minimum wage or less are in the kind of crisis crunch you're depicting, and most people manage to start earning higher wages once they've got some experience and track record behind them in life. Before our society became as dysfunctional as it has in the last 20 years, almost all of those minimum wage earners would have been young adults just getting started in life, with a near-certainty of moving on to better paying jobs, even if they never went higher than assistant manager at a fast food place, it'd still put them decently better off than minimum wage.

Implementing more redistributive policies, and institutionalizing further entitlement mentality in our culture, will make things worse, not better, because these are a big part of what has made things so messed up in the first place.

Ah, so you take the cheapest and worst places to live for home expenses, but then you take national average wages and costs of everything else instead of those cities so you can ignore the downsides of those places and use other cities' higher standard of living to nudge that average up above your chosen "housing cost" areas. You should look into a career as a masseuse, if you massage people half as well as you massage data, you'll have a fine career ahead of you. Or perhaps politics, though I think most politicians would think you're too dishonest for their field based on this.

I didn't mention anything about minimum wage, that's another strawman and deflection on your part. I mentioned dual incomes, and the fact that most families are dual income these days is inarguable. In 1960 70% of households were single-income. By 2012? 31%.

Okay, its possible, as I've already said. What do you think your proving with this?

It all comes down to the cost of automating the person out of the system, vs continuing to use labor. This kind of automation tends to be, well, expensive. To use your robotic lawn mower, it costs $1,500 looking at the list as an averagish price. A push electric mower is about $250 bucks. Still, not hugely expensive, sure. At $15 dollars an hour, you only need to automate about 83 hours of work. If you were using mexican or teenagers, depending on the stereotype at $5 an hour, 250 hours of mowing work.

But, if your a rental company, you need something unload and load the mower. So you need a machine to unload something from the truck. That's probably a not insubstantial piece of equipment, compared to someone picking up a lawn mower and placing it down. Automating that is probably going to be about as expensive as the automated lawn mower. So, another $1,500 dollar piece of equipment to install on the truck.

Then you need charging. What I can do with my current electric equipment is swap charged batteries with exhausted batteries. And swap batteries between other equipment as necessary. Battery swapping automation is another big expensive system, otherwise you have the things that self plug and charge. Which means you need at least an hour of downtime at least for every hour of cutting. This halves the rate one can cut grass with a single mower. Being reduced to 3 hours of mowing a day instead of, say, 6 hours, charged at $20 an hour, reduces daily income from $120 per day to $60 dollars per day. Very similar problems with gas refilling. So, that's another bit of expensive equipment, or your buying two or three automated lawnmowers to keep the throughput high. So, say another $3,000 dollars of equipment.

And of course the truck itself needs to be automated. We don't know how much extra this will cost per vehicle. It will probably be more. Lets say $5,000 dollars.

So, very basic attempts to automate the person out of the lawn mowing adds something like $10,000 in extra equipment. And the person really isn't automated out of the above really. We haven't covered washes, repairs, mapping out the area to be mowed, dealing with a stick or other such thing being left on the yard, getting the mower over the curb or up a stair, someone picking it up if it does break, and a whole bunch of other things. Automating the person out of it gets increasingly expensive.

And of course, if I am doing this work myself, I have no real reason to spend all this money vs just doing it myself and pocketing the $10,000 difference for myself. If I'm hiring someone full time anyways, it might make much more sense to keep the driver, and have him go house to house, drop off the electric mowers, and then pick them up once their done. Also allows us to work with people who want to pay in cash which needs a person there to pick up and count. So, pay an extra $1,000 to have automated mower, then save the rest on the worker. Maybe pay them an extra $2 an hour and pocket the $5,000 difference.

And remember this is all regards to just mowing the lawn, which is one small part of the overall job.

The question isn't if it can be automated, its if its cost efficient to do so. And, well, as stated my sense of recent automation is its being done to replace expensive labor, not cheap labor. Or, the automation will make sense in New York City, it will not make sense in Alabama. Or Brazil.

A bit sneaky of you but your figures are also pretty massaged up there and will set off most experienced people's BS sense.

You count three AI mowers in your cost but only one electric push mower, and take a higher price for the AI mower but the lowest end price for an electric push mower (and that price is only available for mowers with cords, batteries raise it from 275 at the bottom to 800 for a top-end because batteries are most of the cost). You've also got only Team AI paying for gas for some reason. You presume the AI mower needs charging half the time but the electric push mower never needs charging because... I dunno, I guess you still needed that extra bit because your math wasn't adding up to any real profit for your preferred side.

I don't even know where to begin with your idea that you can pay people 5 bucks an hour in this day and age and expect to have any employees.

The thing is that your 10,000 upfront cost is going to melt like snow on an erupting volcano when it runs into wage costs. Let's presume that we've got three mowers on each side. Each works six hours a day. The mower guys are poorly paid, let's call it 15 an hour since fast food workers are making that these days and lawn mowing is hard physical work not everyone is willing to do.

What is the result? The AIs save $45.00 an hour, $270.00 a day, $1890.00 a week. It's in profit over the humans in five and a half weeks. At 11 weeks it will have paid for itself and also generate enough profit to buy an entire second AI lawnmowing system (We'll presume it needs another truck and such). By 16.5 weeks, less than three months, team AI is now running four times as many mowers as team human, at which point perhaps they're cutting all the available lawns (If it's a small town) and have to slow down... but their profits at this point generate whoever bought the first set of AI mowers about 1080 dollars a day more than team human, over 384,000 a year. That's some serious dosh there for a pretty minimal initial investment of 10,000, and that's starting with your rather inflated figures. I think that spells out pretty clearly how cutting humans out can lead to huge profits. Of course, if we start with your actual assumption that team human has only one lawnmower vs. three AI mowers it gets much, much worse.

And of course we have your assumption that Moore's law is going to suddenly stop working and AI won't continue to get cheaper, continue to get better, and squeeze workers even more over time...

I wonder how long it will be before some business realizes they don't need a CEO that makes 7 figures a year and that they can outsource the job to a machine for pennies on the dollar?

Already happening, @DarthOne linked a video that includes how a San Francisco company is making project management AI that not only is running operations but also analyzes the work its employees are doing and writes new AI to do their jobs and eliminate the people under it. It's replacing middle managers now but it's unlikely it won't go after CEOs in time, it's only not done so yet because CEOs are making the decisions about when to employ AI and thus protecting their own interests first.

A Machine Is Replacing Project Managers!

If your work involves doing complex work on a computer every day, you might be out of work sooner than the people who still have jobs in the factories. And if you are a Project Manager in an enterprising organization - then you have something to worry about in all reality.

www.linkedin.com

 

[Aaron Fox]

@Bear Templar, yeah, this video is the future:


That is if my feeling about reality using my future-history setting notes as a sort of blueprint for our future like it used Stand on Zanzibar (for the last, oh, 48 years at least) is unfounded.

 

[LordsFire]

Snip.

It's just as bad as trying to argue with you over the idea of 'food insecurity.'

If you're just going to drop into personal attacks, especially when I am using directly sourced data to make my point, I'm not going to waste my time arguing with you.

Here:



Maybe you'll listen to Sowell.

 

[JagerIV]

@Bear Ribs

statement 1

"I don't even know where to begin with your idea that you can pay people 5 bucks an hour in this day and age and expect to have any employees. "

Statement 2

"we already know that jobs aren't keeping up with population growth"

So, there are not enough jobs, but people also won't work for $5 (even if it was legal) an hour because they have so many other, better opportunities. Do you understand my issue with this argument? This does not seem to be evidence of an automation crisis.

Also, what are you talking about gas? Gas price is not counted in either one. I was saying if they're automated, you need another machine to either refuel the gas or switch batteries, so that's either another capital intensive refueler or reloader, or multiple charging stations.

If anything, I'm probably underestimating some of the expenses of setting this stuff up is. And as I said, all the expense above doesn't actually get the person out of the loop. So your not actually saving all that much labor anyways: operating 3 electric motors like you suggest still is going to require a person in that loop. And, as I said, that's one part of the job. Its one worker vs three at the most optimistic. Is that better? Of course. Is it an automation crisis? Eh.

Throwing out preposterous numbers that you should be aware are self evidently ridiculous since they obviously can't be true is not particularly convincing.

We may be reaching moving in circles territory at this point though.

I just don't care about what machine learning is doing, so I don't understand why you keep bringing it up. Its more or less irrelevant to the issue. Machine learning doesn't really get a cheaper car. I would assume computers aren't driving cost, which may be an overly optimistic assumption.

The cost is the machines to automate the human body.

Edit: looking over your post again, I think we see another major point of disagreement is the assumption that

1) RnD is the main cost of production. This is I think applying software thinking, where the information on a disk is worth a whole lot more than the, well I guess we don't really do this all that much more, but when we did buy CDs its a 20 cent CD with $50 dollars of data on it. There RnD is something like 90% of the cost. Manufacturing goods your talking about RnD being something like 10% if its something with mass production.

2) That most of the RnD has been done. Experimental models are one thing. Much more important however will be the first hundred or so manufactured. By the basics of Wright's law, or Experience curves, the big RnD yet to do is going to be once you reach the point of building a couple hundred. More or less, every doubling of production, generally you get an x% reduction in price. For machine tools, probably the closest we have, its about a 15% reduction per doubling. So, producing the first 100 we would expect to bring costs down about 60% over 6 doublings. Getting to a 1,000 produced is when the per model costs would be around 20% specialized equipment costs, and such.

This I think is a very different model of events than what you seem to be picturing, where the main hurdle is software design.

 

[Aaron Fox]

It's just as bad as trying to argue with you over the idea of 'food insecurity.'

If you're just going to drop into personal attacks, especially when I am using directly sourced data to make my point, I'm not going to waste my time arguing with you.

Here:



Maybe you'll listen to Sowell.

The sad thing is Sowell's wrong at least in part. Especially since many people keep forgetting that this itty-bitty 'little' thing called the technological context has a major pull on determining things. A lot of traditional economists keep ignoring this little determinator of how things go, especially as economics got more politically polarized.

@Bear Ribs

statement 1

"I don't even know where to begin with your idea that you can pay people 5 bucks an hour in this day and age and expect to have any employees. "

Statement 2

"we already know that jobs aren't keeping up with population growth"

So, there are not enough jobs, but people also won't work for $5 (even if it was legal) an hour because they have so many other, better opportunities. Do you understand my issue with this argument? This does not seem to be evidence of an automation crisis.

Also, what are you talking about gas? Gas price is not counted in either one. I was saying if they're automated, you need another machine to either refuel the gas or switch batteries, so that's either another capital intensive refueler or reloader, or multiple charging stations.

If anything, I'm probably underestimating some of the expenses of setting this stuff up is. And as I said, all the expense above doesn't actually get the person out of the loop. So your not actually saving all that much labor anyways: operating 3 electric motors like you suggest still is going to require a person in that loop. And, as I said, that's one part of the job. Its one worker vs three at the most optimistic. Is that better? Of course. Is it an automation crisis? Eh.

Throwing out preposterous numbers that you should be aware are self evidently ridiculous since they obviously can't be true is not particularly convincing.

We may be reaching moving in circles territory at this point though.

I just don't care about what machine learning is doing, so I don't understand why you keep bringing it up. Its more or less irrelevant to the issue. Machine learning doesn't really get a cheaper car. I would assume computers aren't driving cost, which may be an overly optimistic assumption.

The cost is the machines to automate the human body.

Edit: looking over your post again, I think we see another major point of disagreement is the assumption that

1) RnD is the main cost of production. This is I think applying software thinking, where the information on a disk is worth a whole lot more than the, well I guess we don't really do this all that much more, but when we did buy CDs its a 20 cent CD with $50 dollars of data on it. There RnD is something like 90% of the cost. Manufacturing goods your talking about RnD being something like 10% if its something with mass production.

2) That most of the RnD has been done. Experimental models are one thing. Much more important however will be the first hundred or so manufactured. By the basics of Wright's law, or Experience curves, the big RnD yet to do is going to be once you reach the point of building a couple hundred. More or less, every doubling of production, generally you get an x% reduction in price. For machine tools, probably the closest we have, its about a 15% reduction per doubling. So, producing the first 100 we would expect to bring costs down about 60% over 6 doublings. Getting to a 1,000 produced is when the per model costs would be around 20% specialized equipment costs, and such.

This I think is a very different model of events than what you seem to be picturing, where the main hurdle is software design.

That isn't the case. We're still new to this 'machine learning' business and it has constantly eradicated what we assumed is reality when it comes to AI programming. We're already seeing AI-designed music, AI-written novels, and if what I heard is right, AI paintings.

It's your stubbornness to not see what is actually happening that is making things worse here.

 

[LordsFire]

The sad thing is Sowell's wrong at least in part. Especially since many people keep forgetting that this itty-bitty 'little' thing called the technological context has a major pull on determining things. A lot of traditional economists keep ignoring this little determinator of how things go, especially as economics got more politically polarized.

That isn't the case. We're still new to this 'machine learning' business and it has constantly eradicated what we assumed is reality when it comes to AI programming. We're already seeing AI-designed music, AI-written novels, and if what I heard is right, AI paintings.

It's your stubbornness to not see what is actually happening that is making things worse here.

Yes, AI produced novels.

Like so:

https://www.hogwartsishere.com/library/book/9290/chapter/1/

Real killer, that.

AI is improving. Machine learning is improving. But there are still fundamental constraints it operates under, that if it every overcomes, will take a very long time indeed to do so. It is very often the case that something that is extremely easy for a human to understand at a glance, AI needs hundreds of hours of dedicated programming to recognize some instances of.

Gradual, incremental improvements are to be expected, and more significant jumps in very specific fields from time to time, but predictions of imminent cyber-dystopia or utopia run by machines have been proven wrong consistently for the last forty years.

Human competence and incompetence both exceed machine capacity for either.

 

[Bear Ribs]

The sad thing is Sowell's wrong at least in part. Especially since many people keep forgetting that this itty-bitty 'little' thing called the technological context has a major pull on determining things. A lot of traditional economists keep ignoring this little determinator of how things go, especially as economics got more politically polarized.

I took several years of college economics and I'm not that impressed by Baby's First Economics Text. Sowell's work is quite good for people who have no idea whatsoever how money works but he's bad about strawmanning any position he personally disagrees with and tends to support his politics over the science, granted that's a problem most economists have.

It doesn't help that he's very firmly on Supply-Side for economic theory while I myself am deep in Demand-Side so I tend to naturally disagree with him.

In Sowell's mind, you boost the economy by giving money to the rich to create supply, which people will then buy because the supply exists. I disagree because if all the other people do not have the money to buy those goods, they can't buy the supply even if it's there, and the rich have no incentive to use that money to create supplies nobody will buy so no production or trade happens.

In my mind, you boost the economy by giving money to the poor, and then when they inevitably go to buy something with it, the rich (or entrepreneurs, etc.) will make goods to meet their demand because there's money to be earned there, so production and trade happens.

@Bear Ribs

statement 1

"I don't even know where to begin with your idea that you can pay people 5 bucks an hour in this day and age and expect to have any employees. "

Statement 2

"we already know that jobs aren't keeping up with population growth"

So, there are not enough jobs, but people also won't work for $5 (even if it was legal) an hour because they have so many other, better opportunities. Do you understand my issue with this argument? This does not seem to be evidence of an automation crisis.

Yes, I can see where you're coming from here, but this is just a cheap "gotcha" based on taking two sentences from different contexts.

Real wages haven't kept up with inflation because humans have been accepting lower and lower real wages to compensate for machines eating their lunches for decades. Job creation also hasn't kept up with population growth and hours of available work aren't keeping up either. These facts are indisputable, though there's room to disagree as to why.

However in the context of playing with proposed numbers for a business right now assuming you can find a worker for 5 dollars an hour is pretty preposterous, the context of current dollars for a hypothetical is quite different from looking at broad trends across five decades.

What's really funny here is you've actually made my point about UBI entirely by accident. One of the main draws of UBI is that you would be able to get people to work for 5 an hour because with basic necessities covered by the UBI, people wouldn't have to make a living out of their job, just enough for what luxuries they wanted, and in comparison to current various welfare and unemployment schemes there would be no perverse incentive not to work because you wouldn't lose your UBI because you got off the couch. This would let people work for lower wages without starving to death in the process and thus keep them competitive with machines longer. With UBI in the loop, Team Human can mow for 5 dollars an hour thus staying competitive with Team AI.

Also, what are you talking about gas? Gas price is not counted in either one. I was saying if they're automated, you need another machine to either refuel the gas or switch batteries, so that's either another capital intensive refueler or reloader, or multiple charging stations.

I see then, I misread your statement about "Gas is similar" to mean you were counting fuel prices. I retract the statement.

There's no particular reason to switch batteries, though. Current-model robotic mowers (and vacuum cleaners) know to seek out their charger when their battery is low and do so automatically. Since the AI will never take time off for holidays, vacations, or family issues, and never needs to sleep so it can also work nights without overtime, it will have no issues both charging itself and working far more hours than any human per day which makes that expensive hardware you're fixated on even cheaper for the AI, it's mower is running all day instead of just a third of it so you get more profit out of the same mower.

If anything, I'm probably underestimating some of the expenses of setting this stuff up is. And as I said, all the expense above doesn't actually get the person out of the loop. So your not actually saving all that much labor anyways: operating 3 electric motors like you suggest still is going to require a person in that loop. And, as I said, that's one part of the job. Its one worker vs three at the most optimistic. Is that better? Of course. Is it an automation crisis? Eh.

Throwing out preposterous numbers that you should be aware are self evidently ridiculous since they obviously can't be true is not particularly convincing.

I used your numbers. The only one I didn't keep was your 5 dollar an hour wage which I replaced with 15 more in line with current wages. It is not my fault your numbers don't support your position. If anything your numbers were excessively supportive to your own side, I didn't have team human paying payroll taxes, supplying health insurance to its employees, doing 401K matching, no employee ever got sick or had to be paid overtime, etc. I had the AI work only the same hours as humans instead of a 24-hour cycle they can do in real life. Even with you having every possible advantage your own numbers made your side crash and burn. Increase the cost of the AI tenfold and it will still beat the humans in short order.

We may be reaching moving in circles territory at this point though.

I just don't care about what machine learning is doing, so I don't understand why you keep bringing it up. Its more or less irrelevant to the issue. Machine learning doesn't really get a cheaper car. I would assume computers aren't driving cost, which may be an overly optimistic assumption.

The cost is the machines to automate the human body.

Edit: looking over your post again, I think we see another major point of disagreement is the assumption that

1) RnD is the main cost of production. This is I think applying software thinking, where the information on a disk is worth a whole lot more than the, well I guess we don't really do this all that much more, but when we did buy CDs its a 20 cent CD with $50 dollars of data on it. There RnD is something like 90% of the cost. Manufacturing goods your talking about RnD being something like 10% if its something with mass production.

This explains a lot of why you don't get it. I've already pointed out, the cost of the machines is baked in either way so it's irrelevant. RnD is the main cost of production for the AI because the AI can be endlessly copied for pennies per thousand once the RnD is done. Once the first car-driving machine learning algorithm is perfected, the expensive RnD is over and the only expense is copying it over and over. An AI is software, not manufactured goods, and treating it as a manufactured good will only yield fallacious results.

If you're hauling a truck of goods across the US, the human is driving a truck, or an AI is driving the truck. Either way, the truck has to be paid for so the cost of the truck doesn't matter to the discussion. I've already pointed this out, talking about how "it's the forklift that costs more" is irrelevant if we're discussing human forklift operator vs. AI forklift operator, only the cost of the driver is actually involved and the cost of the forklift is a smokescreen. I think this fixation you have on the cost of the tool both use instead of comparing the cost of the AI to the wages of the human driving it because both of them will have to pay for a truck is the problem here.

If it helps consider the AI more like entertainment. In this situation, the AI is a film and the human is a theatre troupe doing live-action shows. It's expensive to make the movie but once it's made, it can be streamed and copied very cheaply while the theatre troupe has to keep paying its actors for every single show and it's limited in how many people can watch, along with dealing with human frailties like . Both have to pay for costumes so fixating on those costs has no relevance, you have to compare the startup cost of the movie vs. the continuing cost of the legitimate stage show wages.

Unsurprisingly, in real life movies completely dominate and stage shows are barely above hobby-level.

2) That most of the RnD has been done. Experimental models are one thing. Much more important however will be the first hundred or so manufactured. By the basics of Wright's law, or Experience curves, the big RnD yet to do is going to be once you reach the point of building a couple hundred. More or less, every doubling of production, generally you get an x% reduction in price. For machine tools, probably the closest we have, its about a 15% reduction per doubling. So, producing the first 100 we would expect to bring costs down about 60% over 6 doublings. Getting to a 1,000 produced is when the per model costs would be around 20% specialized equipment costs, and such.

This I think is a very different model of events than what you seem to be picturing, where the main hurdle is software design.

I absolutely don't think most of the RnD is done. I think we need to look quite hard at where it's going, however, and be prepared to change our economy to accommodate the way things are going. You could not run the modern economic system off of using silver and gold shekels, we had to adapt how money worked to modern technology. We're similarly going to have to adapt how our economic systems work to include the currently emerging technology of machine learning and hyper-automation.

I'm not surprised you don't want to discuss machine learning, it's what makes your arguments so irrelevant. The hardware doesn't matter, it's going to be needed either way. The question is if the AI can replace the human, not the truck/lawnmower/forklift the human is driving. So all your manufactured goods calculations don't mean squat because the human needs the hardware too, only the easily-copied software vs. the human is actually relevant to what we're actually talking about here.

We've been seeing worsening effects from increasing automation in the form of rapidly increasing wealth concentration, stagnating wages, and reduced job growth for a long time now and it's going to go bad places if we don't eventually come up with a solution.

 

[Zachowon]

No, we've been exploring that primarily through more advanced technology making labor more efficient.

Education fills a head with knowledge, some of which might be false. It has its use, but better tools and actual work experience are what improve 'how well humans can accomplish things.'


It's less durable, less flexible, and only capable of finer manipulation after enormous investments of man-hours and finances to make it so.

Using current transistor-based technology, AI will never be more adaptable, because the fundamental nature of how AI 'thought' operates compared to human thought sticks them with fundamental limitations they cannot overcome. They can operate faster in specialized math-based tasks, and in that specific way be more intelligent, but easy grasp and understanding of concepts is something that is not possible based on current technology.

Now, if a completely new type of computing is invented, we may get computers capable of doing such. But the alternative to the transistor to base that off of doesn't even exist yet, much less having been developed into a mature technology capable of surpassing human thought.

This is not a catch-22 for me, this is a catch-22 for you.

I can and have pointed out the entire history of the first world over the last 200 years as evidence that new technology doesn't result in permanent unemployment. You can't point to any piece of new technology that has, and now you're actually claiming that it's impossible to do so?

When you start claiming that it is impossible for the key evidence supporting your argument to exist, you're in a bad place.

Yes, things change due to technology. Human nature does not, and it is human nature which governs economics, because humans are those who are at base responsible for both production, and consumption. The details change, and some of those details are very important, but a machine is never going to earn a paycheck, go home, pay rent, and then buy food and/or luxuries.

Well gosh, would you look at that. There's a direct relationship between how expensive a thing has proportionately become, and how much the government has intervened with and distorted the market for that good or service.

It's almost like more government intervention makes things worse, not better.


This is such bullshit I don't even know how to respond.

You want some cites? I'll give you some cites.

1. I am staying in a 3-bedroom (the third is small, so let's call it a 2.5 bedroom) apartment, the monthly rent is 830 dollars a month. If I paid for that myself, rather than splitting it with one roommate, I could still afford it on a single full-time job at minimum wage. That's not possible for everyone though, so let's look at some actual numbers.

2. Let's look at rental rates in some non-crazy cities around the nation:
Top two listings in Superior, WI, ~800 a month for 2 bedroom, 1 bath.
~850-1200 a month in Cheyenne, WY, for 2 bedroom, 1 bath.
800-1200 a month in Grand Rapids, MI, though you have to scroll down a ways to get past the expensive stuff at the top of the listings.
Here I actually had to start sorting for cheap stuff; Atlanta, GA, 800-1200 for a 2 bedroom, 1 bathroom.
I know from personal experience that if you're actively looking for a cheap part of the country to live in, you can do so for considerably less.

3. Let's look at food costs. Let's start with an easily-findable list of groceries that'll get you through a week at a decent price. This outta do it. Granted, it's based on 2016 grocery prices, so let's generously slap 20% inflation on that, and say it's 24$ a week, instead of 20. Multiply by 4 for a family of 4 (closest to average American family size), and that's 100 dollars a week. Four and a half weeks in a month, and even though we've rounded up at every stage, we're still coming out to ~450 dollars a month.

We're now up to 1250-1700 or so a month.

4. A car. You can get one as low as 1500$ but I wouldn't recommend going under 3 grand unless you already know the seller and/or the car. Split that up into something spread out by 12 months, and you have 250$. Add insurance, which in Michigan runs around 300$ for six months, and Michigan is one of the most expensive states in the union for car insurance (mine dropped by 60% when I moved out of the state), and you're up to 300 a month. Tack on another 100 a month for gas and minor repairs.

1650-2100 a month in living expenses.

5. Medical treatment. This is an incredibly volatile thing. If your have good genes, don't take stupid risks, and don't have terrible luck, this could be as low as a couple hundred per person per year. One major medical expense though, can run from tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and aside from not deliberately doing stupid things, there's very little one can do to control that. For most people though, in their younger and healthier years, the low end of costs is the norm. If we call it 300$ per person per year (which is much more than I generally spend myself, but I'm deliberately erring high), then that's 1200 for the family of four, or another 100 per month.

6. Cell Phone/internet service. This'll run you another 100-200$ a month for a family plan, generally speaking.

This brings us up to 1950-2400 a month.

This brings together bare-bones essential costs, though I did forget to count utilities with rent, for places where that is not included. Based on past experiences, that'd probably run 200-300 a month for a family of four, though bringing our total up to 2250-2700 a month.

Now, what's the income at Federal minimum wage? 7.25 per hour. If we had two parents working full-time at minimum-wage jobs, that's 80 hours a week, or 580 per week, coming to 2320 per month, which is barely enough to scrape by at the bottom end of the spectrum. 1160 dollars personal income per month is enough to live on by yourself, if you're smart, but two incomes at that level is hard for a family to get by on. It's only 29,000 a year, assuming both parents take two weeks worth of time off over the course of the year.

This is a real financial problem for this poor family, but let's look at some expanded statistics...

How much of the labor force is earning minimum wage (or less)? 1.9% a of 2019.

Boy, that really changes the picture now, doesn't it?

Just move up to the 9 or 10 dollar minimum wage common in many states, and you easily exceed the 2700 monthly cost estimate. That's still a really tight budget, but it is livable.

Now, let's look at the situation that you claimed, two college graduates working full-time to keep living in a small apartment. Now, what is the average starting salary of a college graduate?

$53,889 a year, according to one of the top results I found on a quick search. (Granted, I bet they're excluding a lot of graduates with completely useless degrees from their results, but its those graduates own fault for pursuing useless degrees, so they're not terribly germane to this discussion. If they are included in these results, then college graduates are doing way better than 54k a year once they stop dragging the average down.)

Wow. That really changes the picture, doesn't it? That's almost twice what the two minimum-wage earners brought in together. Obviously an average isn't going to account for everyone, but if that's your average, anything approaching a normal distribution is going to mean that a vanishingly low number of people have as low an income by themselves as two minimum wage earners would have together.

And if you put two of these average earners together, you have enough income to live on twice this calculated minimum living expense, leaving plenty of funds for paying off student loans and saving for the future.


So, to sum up, your assertion that the cost of living is so high that college graduates can barely make it on two incomes, is complete nonsense from beginning to end.

In fact, only the 1.9% or so of people earning minimum wage or less are in the kind of crisis crunch you're depicting, and most people manage to start earning higher wages once they've got some experience and track record behind them in life. Before our society became as dysfunctional as it has in the last 20 years, almost all of those minimum wage earners would have been young adults just getting started in life, with a near-certainty of moving on to better paying jobs, even if they never went higher than assistant manager at a fast food place, it'd still put them decently better off than minimum wage.

Implementing more redistributive policies, and institutionalizing further entitlement mentality in our culture, will make things worse, not better, because these are a big part of what has made things so messed up in the first place.

Before I joined the Army, I lived off 9.75 an hour working part time st staples living eith a friend in a 550 a month apartment. 2 bed 1 bath. We paid for internet and electricity.

 

[The Phule]

Wisconsin weather which isn't all that pleasant.

What's wrong with Wisconson weather?

Grand Rapids has freaking 27% unemployment and a violent crime rate 68% higher than average, and everything that isn't a house is so expensive you wind up with 89% of average living expenses... wages meanwhile are so low the average person in Grand Rapids earns only 73% of the national average.

Hey, that's my home you're talking about!

Yeah. It's a shitpit. But I grew up there. Still have fond memories. Still think of it as home, you know?

 

[Bear Ribs]

What's wrong with Wisconson weather?

Hey, that's my home you're talking about!

Yeah. It's a shitpit. But I grew up there. Still have fond memories. Still think of it as home, you know?

Yeah, I get what you mean. For what it's worth, I live in Oklahoma where the sky regularly tries to Destroy All Humans and I still wouldn't trade it in for California.

Overall Wisconsin is considered one of the worst places in the country for weather, scoring a 6.5/10. It has only four months a year where the temperature is considered pleasant, heavy snowfall, few sunny days, and miserably cold winters. Grand Rapids is similar, scoring a 6.7 due to high snowfall, few sunny days, and extreme temperatures, but the winters aren't quite as cold as Wisconsin so it's slightly higher.

https://www.bestplaces.net/climate/state/wisconsin

In comparison, a high-priced location like Carlsbad is a 9/10. It has mostly sunny weather, the summers are never very hot and the winters are never very cold (Low in the 50s for the coldest month and high in the 70s for the hottest month).

https://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/california/carlsbad

TL;DR, if a place seems to be incredibly cheap to live in there's around a 100% chance there's some hidden extreme downside you haven't noticed like crime, low wages/high unemployment, or horrible weather because otherwise other people would be moving there and would have driven the costs back up.

 

[JagerIV]

I don't care because AI WON'T DRIVE COST.

You keep thinking of this as a programing issue, instead of a manufacturing issue. That is my criticism. The AI is not a long term problem, for similar issues as what you've said: the AI, at least theoretically, is mostly R&D expenses. You yourself agree that the price of AI is irrelant to all this. Or at least, it should be on any mass job. I'm not sure how affordable it will be on small scale limited use aplications.

What you seem to be missing is the huge amount of additional hardware that you need to replace a human. All that extra hardware is going to be expensive, especially since a lot of it is going to be specialized, limited run production.

As I've explained before, I've worked in a trucking company. Do you know how many truck drivers we would fire if we magically got free self driving car packets for all our trucks? ZERO. Because there are still a whole mess of other things the people do. Taking orders, unloading, refueling the truck and paying for gas, putting out cones, excetera. Fully replacing all the many different tasks the driver involve increasingly expensive and specialized machines that will then require increasingly expensive maintenance and additional support structures.

Unloading the truck for example would probably require something on the scale of a manufacturing arm in a factory. That's a $100,000 dollar machine. Its getting cheaper, but on the other hand you probably want a lighter one than what we build now, and then need to integrated to the power system of the truck, so that would drive expenses up.

Part of my point with the automated lawn mowers that you can't actually do it for even $10,000 dollars.

When do you think automated lawn care would be possible at a cost effective way?

 

[Zachowon]

AI is more expensive

 

[Cherico]

The biggest advantage human labor has over machines is that CEOs and busines leaders have to care about their machines.

People are easier to replace.

 

[JagerIV]

The biggest advantage human labor has over machines is that CEOs and busines leaders have to care about their machines.

People are easier to replace.

This is somewhat unironically a case: if one of our drivers get sick, the CEO can trust (well, maybe less now as I think that system is slowly falling appart), but at least there's a system in place to handle that. If the scheme above of automating truck loading and loading was implemented with robots, when one breaks, in my town of a few 10s of thousands, there probably aren't all that many robot repair men available. For hundreds of thousand dollar equipment, having break downs and not being able to fix it quickly and losing days if not weeks of business is painful.

And then you have the part time consideration. For the grass cutting, if your only doing it for 20 weeks a year, people can work a bit on weekends or over the summer, and switch to over jobs the rest of the time. As well as handling all of the other nonwork concerns.

Its all questions of relative value at this point, and where thresholds are. I do still have many concerns that this is going to be a "replacing expensive workers" rather than replacing workers. Which is where I think many of the problems of this industrial revolution compared to the others.

Edit.

Thinking of my personal mental model of the industrial revolutions, and the questions of this one.

First Revolution: Revolution of power

The first industrial revolution, say up to about 1950s/60s, was primarily one of power. A single train can do what took thousands of horses, if horses could even achieve that. For various reasons however, this revolution had fairly strong monopolizing/centralizing tendacys, though they also required a fair degree of monoply and centrisation as well.

For example, England could have a couple of cities which outproduced all of china and India at the same time, and competing with it was, well, something both of those found very difficult to do. Millions of indians with the strength of their backs could barely match the capacity of a steam ship, blacksmiths, no matter how cheap, can't match the scale and production of a steel factory. But, you also needed a huge, centralized system in order to operate on the scale to do a steel foundry.

Second Revolution: Processings

Processing or computers. This is automating, at its most simplistic, pure thought, or progressively more so. This however has had a relative decentralizing effect. For example, running uber manually would require a 100 story 10 acre call center with a secound 100 story building to do bookkeeping and adjust pricing, and track driver records and just process the hundreds of thousands of checks necesary. Which is one of the reasons much more than regional taxi services, and the only places that can really scale up to have any degree of actual organized taxi services were big cities.

With Uber, not only can you manage an estimated 4 million drivers from a quick google with apparently about 25,000 employees, when manually you would probably be talking about 100k-1 million clerks to support that, but you can implement this in places that historically would have been too dysfunctional to operate a full scale steel mill can operate a cell system functional enough for Uber to exist.

And, of course, all our youtubes and such.

Third Revolution: Power Processing

About what were entering now, where you can take that processing into the real world. Were still very early in the process. Its also not clear yet exactly which parts of it are going to be dominant. Or if it they're going to drive centralization or decentralization pushes. The techs were looking at are:

For example, does self driving cars require, in practicality, being plugged into a big, expensive support infrastructure, that's carefully centrally organized, and thus is going to end the independent trucker.

Or does it make it even more trivial to own and operate semi trucks, so the current 9% owner operator stat for the US of about 350,000 individual operators to something even higher as truck driving becomes easier (maybe you don't need a CD license anymore? you can now do all the other work necessary while the truck drives), and it makes mores sense for most business to rent trucking rather than own it.

Or how dominant it is. In the first industrial revolution, the blacksmith can't compete with the steel mill. A farm with a tractor vs without is an immense advantage to the tractor farmer. British textile mills rendered much of Indian traditional textile industry irrelevant.

The second industrial revolution has been much less so. The secretary has become much less common, but it is still nicer to have one if you can afford it, rather than an irrelevancy. Everyone hates not being able to talk to a person on the phone, and most seem to have moved off robocalls if they can help (sometimes to a person in India, that great decentralization centralization we often paradoxically have).

This is my rich worker vs all worker concern. If the automation makes sense no matter what, such as a combine harvester is going to be more cost effective than people with scythes no matter how cheap, this also suggests a broad based ability to improve.

If it only makes sense though where wages are expensive, so say you will have automated trucks in New York, where wages for truck drivers are $40-50 dollars an hour, but are not implemented in, for example, Brazil. This suggests it would be a technology that drives greater divergence.

 

[Bear Ribs]

I don't care because AI WON'T DRIVE COST.

You keep thinking of this as a programing issue, instead of a manufacturing issue. That is my criticism. The AI is not a long term problem, for similar issues as what you've said: the AI, at least theoretically, is mostly R&D expenses. You yourself agree that the price of AI is irrelant to all this. Or at least, it should be on any mass job. I'm not sure how affordable it will be on small scale limited use aplications.

What you seem to be missing is the huge amount of additional hardware that you need to replace a human. All that extra hardware is going to be expensive, especially since a lot of it is going to be specialized, limited run production.

As I've explained before, I've worked in a trucking company. Do you know how many truck drivers we would fire if we magically got free self driving car packets for all our trucks? ZERO. Because there are still a whole mess of other things the people do. Taking orders, unloading, refueling the truck and paying for gas, putting out cones, excetera. Fully replacing all the many different tasks the driver involve increasingly expensive and specialized machines that will then require increasingly expensive maintenance and additional support structures.

Unloading the truck for example would probably require something on the scale of a manufacturing arm in a factory. That's a $100,000 dollar machine. Its getting cheaper, but on the other hand you probably want a lighter one than what we build now, and then need to integrated to the power system of the truck, so that would drive expenses up.

Part of my point with the automated lawn mowers that you can't actually do it for even $10,000 dollars.

When do you think automated lawn care would be possible at a cost effective way?

Lawn care's hard to predict at this point. Basic automation in the form of robotic lawnmowers is already here but the systems we have now are purely for the owner of the home, the lawnmower can't go mow other people's homes yet due to range issues. So owner-operated lawn care is going to start in the next year or so. Roombas went from an expensive novelty in 2002 that cost $1260.00, comparable to a modern automatic lawnmower, to 600 by 2016 to about 200 for the cheaper models today. At the least we can expect the same curve, if not less. The lawn mower going out and trimming other people's lawns for money is more questionable, because relatively few people actually pay for that service. Based on this (somewhat out of date to be sure) estimate, 27 million Americans use some form of lawn or landscaping service, so well under 10% and a significant chunk of those who do may jump at having a robot do it rather than hiring a company that owns a robot to do it. Since this is a fairly low-demand industry which also has a lot of elasticity, money isn't going to be poured into fully automatic lawn mowers like it will other industries.

Everything that can be done without requiring the use of a human hand is largely being automated away. Banks have been using ATMs to replace tellers for decades. Humanoid hands are coming online but it's surprising how many jobs don't actually need hands. You mention gassing up a truck and paying for the fuel as obstacles to a robot truck driver, f'rex, but robots have been able to seek out chargers and replenish themselves for a long time and a robot doesn't need to physically swipe a credit card or hand a wad of bills to a robot cashier to process a payment transaction, sending an electronic signal to okay payment is not the insurmountable barrier to a robot you appear to think. Cones aren't going to be needed anymore because the job site is all robotic and the robots don't need cones to tell where to go, they'll be using maps, LIDAR, and GPS to navigate. If a cone is really that essential you don't need to create a humanoid robot that physically picks up and carries the cones, you could have a cone mounted on an RC car type chassis that rolls into position on its own and rolls back into the warehouse or back into the truck when done. Warehouses are already being automated with robotic forklifts, a bit more software and the same forklift will simply load and unload trucks as needed.

As far as overall effects on employment, MIT did a study on the matter to determine how many jobs are lost to automation and how quickly. It showed pretty clearly that the workers aren't finding new jobs, they aren't being counted as unemployed due to how the US calculates unemployment but each robot is slightly but measurably reducing the employed:total population ratio.

The researchers found that for every robot added per 1,000 workers in the U.S., wages decline by 0.42% and the employment-to-population ratio goes down by 0.2 percentage points — to date, this means the loss of about 400,000 jobs. The impact is more sizable within the areas where robots are deployed: adding one more robot in a commuting zone (geographic areas used for economic analysis) reduces employment by six workers in that area.

I've seen a number of estimates on where things are headed but COVID changed things, it dramatically increased how fast things are being automated and how fast jobs are being lost due to its effects on the available workforce and lockdowns. The most reasonable estimate I came across was about thirty percent of the entire world workforce being automated away by 2030 but predictions of the future are always foggy. Another pandemic could speed things up considerably, or a political change such as UBI could slow it back down.

 

[Aaron Fox]

Yeah, so far Economists have been ignoring the fact that the technological context that they're working in isn't really like anything we've seen before. We can make parallels, of course, because history and time love to rhyme, but the reality is people are ignoring the actual reality and focusing on the metaphorical spherical cows at the expense of all else.

Also, add to the fact that fertility rates are largely because of economic and social reasons (children being too expensive and children ruining career chances respectively)...

 

[Cherico]

Yeah, so far Economists have been ignoring the fact that the technological context that they're working in isn't really like anything we've seen before. We can make parallels, of course, because history and time love to rhyme, but the reality is people are ignoring the actual reality and focusing on the metaphorical spherical cows at the expense of all else.

Also, add to the fact that fertility rates are largely because of economic and social reasons (children being too expensive and children ruining career chances respectively)...

people are having less children for a lot of reasons.


One of them is that cheap birth control became a thing during the 1960s, a whole lot of the prevously unwanted children were not born. Another factor is urbanization, cities are engines of fincial growth yes but historically their population sinks that have to be maintained by outside imigration. This is still true just to a much lesser extent because we have fewer plagues. Its generally speaking hard to have kids when you live in a box.

then you get into feminism

Family courts, anti male laws, welfair it all comes together to create a price floor. What you dont think the relationship market doesn't follow the rules of economics? It does.

Relationships in the west were made more expensive, so a lot of men checked out. That consumer surplus thats an entire demographic of cat ladies who will never get married and never have children.

Fact is the coming demographic crisis was in large part created by the government deciding to have the same people who caused the problem in the first place solve the problem they created tends not to work out so well.

 

[Aaron Fox]

people are having less children for a lot of reasons.


One of them is that cheap birth control became a thing during the 1960s, a whole lot of the prevously unwanted children were not born. Another factor is urbanization, cities are engines of fincial growth yes but historically their population sinks that have to be maintained by outside imigration. This is still true just to a much lesser extent because we have fewer plagues. Its generally speaking hard to have kids when you live in a box.

then you get into feminism

Family courts, anti male laws, welfair it all comes together to create a price floor. What you dont think the relationship market doesn't follow the rules of economics? It does.

Relationships in the west were made more expensive, so a lot of men checked out. That consumer surplus thats an entire demographic of cat ladies who will never get married and never have children.

Fact is the coming demographic crisis was in large part created by the government deciding to have the same people who caused the problem in the first place solve the problem they created tends not to work out so well.

This sounds like the usual 'feminism is evil!' dreck that I keep hearing from 'conservatives', the sort that keep yelling 'women should stay barefoot in the home!' at the top of their lungs (be publically like some, or via the anonymity of the internet). I'm dead serious here. Also, your models don't include irrational behavior (so far, I haven't seen any model in economics that take that into account) either.

The reality is that feminism isn't the real problem, insomuch that any ideology can be, but everything else and especially a series of anti-equalitarian social mores. Remember, women don't have children if they're career-minded because children effectively nuke careers (we're talking about at least 6 months here, maybe more, out of work). Add to the equation that children are expensive (seriously, tallying up everything that a kid needs is mind-boggling, and that's before you get to things like medication and therapy for those that are atypical, the latter category is something that I'm part of!) anymore, men are less able to get away with abuse (some of the stories that my grandma told me about her first husband were a bit chilling) without consequences, and the like...

... yeah, you can see the social mores collapsing. The funny thing is we're still working on a lot of those social mores despite their collapse, which is one of the major problems in fixing it.

 

[Cherico]

This sounds like the usual 'feminism is evil!' dreck that I keep hearing from 'conservatives', the sort that keep yelling 'women should stay barefoot in the home!' at the top of their lungs (be publically like some, or via the anonymity of the internet). I'm dead serious here. Also, your models don't include irrational behavior (so far, I haven't seen any model in economics that take that into account) either.

The reality is that feminism isn't the real problem, insomuch that any ideology can be, but everything else and especially a series of anti-equalitarian social mores. Remember, women don't have children if they're career-minded because children effectively nuke careers (we're talking about at least 6 months here, maybe more, out of work). Add to the equation that children are expensive (seriously, tallying up everything that a kid needs is mind-boggling, and that's before you get to things like medication and therapy for those that are atypical, the latter category is something that I'm part of!) anymore, men are less able to get away with abuse (some of the stories that my grandma told me about her first husband were a bit chilling) without consequences, and the like...

... yeah, you can see the social mores collapsing. The funny thing is we're still working on a lot of those social mores despite their collapse, which is one of the major problems in fixing it.

Marry a feminist woman, a hardcore one and then after the divorce tell me how great femism is.


There are like I said a lot of reasons why people are having less kids. Feminism is one of them, urbanization is one of them, bad laws are one of them, a welfare state is one of them, birth control is one of them. People are having less kids for multiple reason its not just a shit economy and robots taking the jobs though that doesnt help.




As for technology replacing human labor, technology can also empower people.

We could have a system of poverity or the technology can filter down to the masses and allow them to become more self sufficient. Solar panals that provide power to local homes. Fusion plants built to power cities, the technology your scared of might just lead to a social situation where manufactering goes down to a more local level. With people making things and trading with their neighbors and on line.

We should however not do major social engineering until it is required. Because you could very well just make things a whole lot worse. Like for example causing hyper inflation.