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Comment by playing_colours | Hacker News Reader

I see the future as grim anti-utopia:

Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs obsolete. Therefore, we will end up with high unemployment, low pay jobs, and fierce competition for decreasing number of available positions. The owners of businesses will mostly benefit from the automation. It would be a good solution to introduce convenient life long education and universal basic income. Since businesses benefited most from the progress it is reasonable to tax them in order to pay for social policies.

I am afraid, as soon as we tax businesses more they will move to the countries with low taxes, that are less social towards their citizens. The automation actually can make that move fast and not expensive.

In the end, it will be win for companies and loss for the citizens of both countries.

Is such scenario realistic? What can we do to counter it?

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> Further advancements in AI and automations will make more and more jobs obsolete.

In 1000BC men and women did flour of wheat manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.

In 1000AD men and women did butter of milk manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.

In 1500AD men and women did threads of fur manually. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.

In 1940s women did manual calculations and typing for military, science departments, newspapers. They do no more, these jobs are obsolete.

The whole history of humanity was full of obsolete jobs. Could people in 1000BC ever thing that women would write programs in Python instead of beating wheat? No, they could fancy neither Python nor computer.

People will simply explore other possibilities being free from obsolete jobs, making more services available, more possibilities open.

Two hundred years ago a massage would be totally unavailable for an avg peasant. Today you could have a massage any day because automation let more people do it getting the price down, as well as overall welfare up.

Future is pretty bright exactly because automation, technology would make some jobs obsolete, so more people could navigate spaceships or do other stuff we couldn't even fancy yet.

The problem is that the old jobs didn't require high IQ but the new jobs increasingly do.

In the old days even the dumbest man could carry grain from one place to another or push a plow. Even the dumbest woman could churn butter or milk a cow when told to.

These low-IQ individuals do not have the mental capacity to switch to Python programming - regardless of education.

So the "IQ floor" of the economy is rising. The result is that the high IQ people are fine, but low IQ people end up simply unemployable at any job. It's only in the last 50 years that the IQ floor rose above an undeniably noticeable chunk of the population. 10% of people are under IQ 85, which is too dumb to join the US army (by law). Too dumb to be trusted with powered construction equipment.

Leftists can't conceptualize this problem because of their egalitarian worldview, and rightists either talk about bootstraps or might not even care, seeing it as a sort of justified Darwinism.

> So the "IQ floor" of the economy is rising

I bet this is a wrong implication. Agriculture is way harder than writing php.

> The result is that the high IQ people are fine, but low IQ people end up simply unemployable at any job

Even if this implication were true, there is a whole bunch of new jobs that don't require you to be smart.

You could do sports, train people, be a waiter or a beauty blogger or a web programmer or a politician. I would dare say that the amount of stupid work is growing.

And avg person is not dumb at all, never was. The dumbest few always would find some way of doing some service job, especially when service field is growing. All kind of grooming does not require you to be especially smart, even chimps can do that.

>agriculture is way harder than php

an illiterate man can pull potatoes out of the ground.

No Sorry. Once you understand how a loop and a decision statement works, most of the programming is already demystified. You can make bank on incremental learning and writing applications.

The stakes in agriculture are higher. Who ever thinks manual labor is easy doesn't know what they are talking about. Apart from the tiredness, fatigue part of it. You also get injured, could lose crop to disease, floods etc.

Agriculture is harder than writing code. In fact that's the whole reason why so many of us chose to write code than be a farmer.

You seem to be misunderstanding.

A person who cannot read and write in any language cannot, by definition, write source code.

However, that same person can still receive a verbal command telling them to pull a potato out of the ground. Or move a box from one place to another.

This statement has nothing to do with the detrimental aspects of manual labor. Sitting at a desk as a programmer also has detrimental aspects.

> an illiterate man can pull potatoes

You need to put it there first, and do so avoiding the eruption of soil. Agriculture is very hard and requires much knowledge. Without knowledge you'll destroy both the crop and the land.

The potato puller is not fulfilling the role of agricultural designer. He or she is literally visually identifying a potato and using physics to pull it out of the ground.

It's like the difference between programming (fulfilling tasks), and system architecture, which is something I can't do because I don't have experienxe with huge enterprise stacks.

Yes.

For a visual example, look at John Malkovich's character in the film version of Of Mice and Men. He's mentally retarded. But people tell him - "carry these bags over there". And he does it, and he's useful. There is no job like this now. He's too dumb to be a barista or a gas station attendant or a line cook.

Agree wholeheartedly. As corporations grow into the trillions of dollars range of valuations and work becomes even more complex due to automation, we soon will live in a world where it will be difficult to find a way to purchase the things needed to live.

But x% of us will live really well.

> Leftists can't conceptualize this problem [of perpetual rising unemployment due to technology] because of their egalitarian worldview, and rightists either talk about bootstraps or might not even care, seeing it as a sort of justified Darwinism.

This. So much this. And it would take a Julius Cesar for everyone to see the truth… With physical force. But this hypothetical ruler that saves the day would be an unseen actor, its ideology nonexistent as it corresponds directly with truth as it functions; in contrast to any flawed human character that reasons from humanity, that is, from emotion, prejudice, and mistaken bias. Not seeking glory and fame but instead, letting go of lustful passions, giving what must be given and withholding what must be stored or withheld—achieving balance with the Force. So this implies that the brave Darth Vader/Anakin Skywalker was actually Julius Cesar.

>What can we do to counter it?

You may want to keep an eye on the global protest trend.

How would flooding the economy with “free money” (UBI) not just cause mass inflation? Every experiment I’ve read has been on a small scale. How do economists know what will happen if you give an entire country (both rich and poor) extra money to blow every month?

The term UBI is misleading. Think of it as UBS. Universal Basic Sustenance. If you were given X amount of eatables, a home and healthcare, you could now focus on a lot more.

Sure, you could then say food, home and healthcare wouldn't be much worth(inflated). Then yeah that's the whole point. That's where we want to be.

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