What if reducing routine jobs frees up minds for higher pursuits? In the same way that high level programming languages such as Python have increased the amount of programming jobs, as contrasted with writing in assembly. A quick search on Dice shows Python jobs outnumber assembly 8 to 1.
This might actually lead to a jobs explosion.
While agriculture likely represents the largest shift in labor during the 1900s, there were a huge number of jobs automated away during that time. Assembly lines, factories, and automation have been displacing workers since the dawn of the industrial age.
75 years ago there were basically no information technology jobs, and now it represents nearly 10% of the workforce, or four times the level of agricultural employment.
In summary, I agree with you; freeing people from mundane labor will lead to an explosion of jobs for which people are better suited; jobs which are more engaging and fulfilling as well.
There are always people who fail to adapt and get left behind, but the rest of the world moves on. People like to work.
If a new source of jobs pops up that can employ 50% of the population at higher wages than they are currently earning, no one will complain about it (except maybe for the employers at their current jobs, but they will probably just buy the proverbial tractor).
But looking at the past as a predictor of the future is a very dangerous proposition. We saw that in 2008 when it came to the housing market. Sometimes now really is different from the past. And if we hit that tipping point, it will be much like the posited AI singularity. Vast swaths of humans will become surplus to the most efficient means of completing work. It's important to realize that the people who are talking about this issue as one we need to confront are envisioning a future that is fundamentally different from today or anything that has come before now and they're predicting that for a very specific reason. You can disagree with that reason, but you can't use previous examples of automation-displacing-jobs as a way to dismiss that thinking. Because what's being predicted is fundamentally different from what has already happened.
But wouldn't that make the entertainment industry explode?
I think a lot of people, in the U.S. at least, don’t have that level of financial security (plus the healthcare snafu).
I agree with you about the potential.
Unfortunately though, housing cannot be automated and that is very expensive. Though much of housing costs, at least for new builds, is from regulations and labor. Reduce regulations with better governance, and reduce labor with automation (3D printed houses?), and you’re on your way to part of a solution.
We could have a flood of nice, brand new homes for $300k in Silicon Valley and nice older homes for $200k, in the same way a city like Tokyo or Houston does, if the people of California had not made the deliberate choice to pull up the ladder behind them.
Tokyo isn't a good comparison. The average price for a new home in Tokyo is $600k+ and in the suburbs was almost $400k.(https://resources.realestate.co.jp/buy/how-much-does-it-cost...)
Houston isn't a good example either. Houston has almost no zoning or building regulations, which was on ample display when entire neighborhoods flooded because developers weren't prevented from building houses in flood basins. (CA allows the construction of residential properties in floodplains, which are flat areas that might get flooded if flood control mechanisms fail. In Houston, houses were built in the flood control mechanism.)
There are also plenty of places in California where houses and residential units are being built. In LA, for example, several ten thousands of new residential units were built in the downtown/downtown-adjacent units in the past few years. In San Bernardino/Riverside counties, they still have housing stock available from the last building boom. It's not that the people of California pulled that ladder up; it's simply basic market forces: too many people want to live in the nice parts of California.
There's nothing stopping people from training to be programmers today and working as a spoiled or fortunate software engineer, just as I am today - nothing other than the challenges of training, the time required, their own interests and capabilities, and possibly unawareness of the opportunity. Maybe a few people would try programming if they suddenly had money and no need for a daily job, but they could also do it today.
But is it true to say that automation would fail to free up higher pursuits because there is a shortage of programmers? What would you be doing right now if there were no electricity?
It's pretty difficult to use your mind for higher pursuits when you're starving.
It doesn't matter how cheap calories are if you do not have the income to purchase them.
If you like, change food to housing in my original comment. The point still stands: Higher minded pursuits require a level of safety and security to pursue. That level of safety and security does not exist if you do not have food security and housing security, and those things don't exist if you do not have an income.
As for "Who in the United States is really starving?" It's a much, much bigger problem than people realize. https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-hunger-us
There were similar claims made during the depression. It wasn't about automation then either - it was about wealth inequality and a lack of aggregate demand.
Roosevelt then spent and invested in infrastructure - building stuff like LAX - until the country returned to full employment.
Ok so tell me more about how building LAX was "make work".
>Wouldn't they use more automation to build roads and airports?
So - if we're looking at infrastructure - there are fewer people fixing potholes these days.
Are potholes currently being fixed more efficiently thanks to more sophisticated automation or are they just not being fixed?
No, I'm asking if that's what you're proposing for the 21st century. What projects would you have be initiated that would fill the gap of some roughly 60% of unemployment, in the case of most cities on that map?
* Other forms of public transport
* Green energy infrastructure - wind/solar farms and the smart grids to support them
* Fixing roads, bridges and dams (all currently neglected).
* Building community centers and schools
* Caring for the elderly and infirm
There's a curiously high number of people who declare the jobs program that built LAX an obvious example of make work yet defend silicon vallley's silly startups and bitcoin mining (the purest example of make work) as "socially" useful merely because they were funded with private dollars.
Tech is a bubble, and we dig ourselves in deep. But you don't need to go to the third world to find illiteracy and ignorance. You often don't need to go more than a few miles in any given direction to find entire populations of doomed people - they have no ambition, education, and most importantly no desire to ever have them. The smart ones leave, go to the big city, succeed in school and go to university and end up successful, but for every capable intellect there is often someone who just can't. Its no different than introversion vs extroversion - some people crave the new and different and some people crave consistency and pattern.
And we might like to think otherwise, but automation replaces the routine, not necessarily the physical. But a lot of people don't have the capacity for boundless creativity, in my experience it actually hurts some people to have to think outside the box that much. Like headache causing stress and frustration. They don't become scientists not because the opportunity is not available to them fiscally, but because they cannot think like that. At least not in a professional capacity with forty hours a week consistency.
I don't think we can eliminate that factor. And I think it is much larger than anyone who promotes UBI as leading to an era of scholars and scientists aplenty gives it credence for. Or for not recognizing that as a species we are barely evolved beyond animals that could only, at most, do simple tool manipulation and use. Who couldn't understand the concept of self. Asking for human brains to on average be innovative, imaginative, and capable of running in the highest states of consciousness we can reach on a near constant basis is asking too much of a lot of people.
It asks too much of me many days where I try to find something rote to do rather than face new problems that can get overwhelming, so from someone not on top of the brain potential spectrum, there is a reason why predatory repetitious skinner boxes work, why addiction is such a big problem, why people get stuck in their ways and why change is hard, and these aren't things we will ever eliminate from the species entirely without a serious investment in transhumanist innovation. These people will not become scholars, creatives, or thinkers.
That being said, I'm not convinced its even a problem. A lot of why people crave "meaning" in their lives is the fear of loss. Having a purpose gives you an anchor to always ensure you never go completely adrift from your life as it is. You can lose your job, home, etc but if you have a purpose and feel like you can do something it gives you the strength to keep fighting to survive.
With a UBI, the fight to survival pushed on pretty much everyone by capitalist economics as a means to spur growth changes fundamentally. I would be interested how societies pressure to have purpose and how we build our self worth would change with it.