Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bena | Hacker News Reader

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Because slavery is immoral. And that's what you essentially need to do this. Even with extra steps, it's slavery.

That's the big question about automation that I always ask that just gets handwaved away with "We'll pay a lot" or "People will want to".

There's going to be a job gap, if there's not one now, where we have far more people than jobs that are needed.

So the answer for the unemployment situation is basically accepting the post-scarcity nature of the world and just kind of let people live. No means-testing, no qualifications, just people getting X because it's the right thing to do.

So how do you get people to do anything they don't want to? How do you get people doing the jobs no one may want to do but will need to be done?

Right now the system is rolling due to inertia and the promise that this is temporary. Just because something can be tolerated temporarily, it doesn't mean we can sustain it indefinitely.

And I'm not saying things should stay the same. I'm saying that we are not prepared for the changes that are coming. We do not know the answers to the questions we're about to face. It's going to get difficult.

> So how do you get people to do anything they don't want to? How do you get people doing the jobs no one may want to do but will need to be done?

Don't pay them enough to have everything they want. Everyone deserves food, water, healthcare, and shelter. Basic income covers those things (I'd go so far as to just have those things be the "basic income" instead of money).

For anything like Netflix, Rock Climbing gym membership, plane tickets, or video games, you could need a job to pay for them.

I think many of the 'nice to haves' would eventually become basically free under UBI. As people are freed to engage in low-capital creative work, we'll see a lot more of everything, driving down the prices. Similar to Bandcamp, or indie games on Steam: a massive pool of highly-skilled amateurs which eventually drives down prices.

A job doing what?

Imagine automation doing all of the basic things. And most of the others.

Imagine you can only have 2% of the population employed doing the remaining jobs.

Are you saying only 2% of the population deserves Netflix? Or air travel?

I would argue that for the workers lowest on the totem pole, we're already in a situation not far from what you're calling slavery: people stuck in jobs they hate, with no flexibility, and the threats of crushing debt and eviction to keep them in place. Treatment of low-skill labor is already immoral under our pseudo-capitalist system; can we do better?

More on this idea here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_slavery

One quibble though: I would extend this to basically everybody who wasn't born wealthy.

We can probably do a lot better, but we are on the road to making it worse.

And I know people like to talk about "wage slavery" and to a large degree, they have a point. However, we didn't call what our ancestors did "subsistence slavery". They had to work to subsist. They had to grow or forage their own food, build their own shelter, etc.

So the concept of "working to survive" is pretty much the norm and not the exception already.

And as hard as that can be, we are approaching the time when we will be past that. Where the vast majority of people won't have to work to survive. And, hooray for them, but I'm still concerned for the minority.

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