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> if they automated and outsourced everything they would end up with roving bands of unemployed men causing trouble in the countryside

Tangent: I'm not even sure that Universal Basic Income would solve this problem. If you browse Financial Independence forums, you'll see many anecdotes of early retirees who go back to work for one reason or another. So even (some? Most? Not sure...) people with enough money to not have to work, want to work. It seems like a large cultural change around work would be needed.

Having said that, it's also possible that we just keep inventing new jobs and a huge unemployment spike never comes. That doesn't seem likely to me, but I'm fairly certain most of my predictions will end up being wrong.

There are many misconceptions about work, and one of the big ones is that work actually often means "paid work". There is tons of unpaid work being done. And there is a certain percentage of people who cannot sit still and have to do something. If that gets paid or not is a whole different matter.

Good callout. For the record, I was referring to paid work and official unemployment numbers.

Remember that US official unemployment numbers exclude people who aren't actually looking for work.

I'm not sure what utopia you envision. But the reality is it takes an extreme amount to do none trivial things that arent just on a screen.

Where I live, McDonald's and other stores have already started replacing cashiers with touchscreens.

Not everyone can be a doctor or a lawyer. What about all those people who used to do a job that is now replacing them with a touchscreen or a "chat bot"? What do you envision for them? That they go back to school to train to be a doctor or a lawyer? Sure, will you agree to making education and training free or accessible, or will this require continued privilege where it's a requirement to be born into a rich family first?

There's over 8 billion people on the planet. How many blue collar jobs do you envision as being available to people if all the white collar jobs are replaced by AI and ML and automation and outsourcing and offshoring? Am I supposed to be a bricklayer now when I'm already too old physically for the punishing demands of that job?

A long time ago I knew a guy whose job was off-shored to the Philippines from Canada. He actually moved to the Philippines to keep it, but this isn't an option available to most people.

> What about all those people who used to do a job that is now replacing them with a touchscreen or a "chat bot"? What do you envision for them?

With fertility rates below replacement level in the west... nothing! We'll need these workers in more lucrative and useful industries.

> That they go back to school to train to be a doctor or a lawyer?

Interesting you chose the two professions with the most gatekeeping. How about the hundred of skilled trades making civilized life possible?

I don’t know how you square your anecdote about keeping workers busy and tired so they won’t rebel, with the idea that UBI is needs to come for all the unemployed people.

They’ll just invent a bunch of make work bullshit jobs to teach us the dignity of work and to appreciate our largesse, and make sure we fight among ourselves instead of question the whole damn system

Unemployed people can plant potatos and feed themselves from the land. Men were able to do so with very little technology for thousands of years. Surely they can do that with today tech even more efficiently.

Not sure what you mean. If we end up with roving bands of unemployed men raising trouble, the next step for them is incarceration. The law is the law, no matter your circumstances.

This quote is relevant:

>The make-work bias is best illustrated by a story, perhaps apocryphal, of an economist who visits China under Mao Zedong. He sees hundreds of workers building a dam with shovels. He asks: “Why don’t they use a mechanical digger?” “That would put people out of work,” replies the foreman. “Oh,” says the economist, “I thought you were making a dam. If it’s jobs you want, take away their shovels and give them spoons.”

I think you are wrong in saying "Basic income needs to happen first." [emphasis mine] We have continually increased efficiency for hundreds of years without causing mass unemployment. I think there's still quite a ways to go before we have more bodies than we can find a use for. Not to mention there's a shorter, 32-hour week on the horizon that could negate the effect of less demand for labor.

You are decades out of touch with reality, because I read years ago already that some guys estimated we hit the break even point (in the "western world") in the mid 90s already. That is almost 3 decades ago by now, and automation hasn't stopped during that time. Do you see the effects? Very much so, if you start looking for the signs of that.

Furthermore, the idea that we went through a number of such changes and this one is all the same is merely wishful thinking. Economy exists because humans divide work. Why do we work? To fulfill our needs, you know, stuff like not being thirsty, hungry, having shelter, being healthy, having some entertainment, this kinda stuff. The more we automate all these things, the less humans are involved, and following that it means the economy will shrink. As said: humans divide work, or more correctly: Their time, which is the ultimate currency in this whole thing. It is only during the phase of ramping up the automation that we need to do more than for our needs: We have to have additional economy and thus work to make the automation happen.

Following that it is clear that a basic income people can actually live from MUST happen during the transition phase towards "full" automation, not after. Even more so with the system as it is currently, because no work means no income, and if the government doesn't keep people alive, you can just wait for civil war to happen, and before that a big raise in all kinds of crimes. There are more than enough examples of that out there, some of them pretty recent.

>You are decades out of touch with reality, because I read years ago already that some guys estimated we hit the break even point (in the "western world") in the mid 90s already.

And you are out of touch with the current reality. The "western world" is currently undergoing a labor shortage; in the United States, unemployment just hit its lowest point in 50 years! That runs completely counter to the thesis that increased automation will inevitably cause mass unemployent.

You've also disregarded the obvious solution to any decreasing demand for labor: make the work week shorter and everyone simply works fewer hours.

>The more we automate all these things, the less humans are involved, and following that it means the economy will shrink.

You've conflated "the size of the economy" and "total hours of labor". By any reasonable definition of economic size, if you have two societies and one produces more economically valuable output than the other, then it is larger, regardless of how many hours of labor are involved. One worker with a spoon produces less than one worker with a shovel, and spending ten times as long to achieve the same result does not make that economy larger.

Offshoring and automating contracts the economy because all the people who were employed were spending money on goods and services.

Now what has happened is that they don't have a job or the job left to employ someone in a foreign country.

Economy contracts.

Sure, the owners of company X have a few more dollars, and sure, the economy of the foreign land grew a bit because now there is someone purchasing goods and services, but the domestic economy contracted.

Then for a double whammy, because the people who ran the country were stupid and allow foreigners or foreign-controlled corporations to come in and buy up real-estate, this money then floods in and starts buying up residential properties creating a shortage of housing, which creates a double crunch because now these unemployed folks need to figure it out as supply and demand is causing purchase or rent of real estate to go up. Food is going up, everything is going up.

The outside economy it's no problem for them because through economies of scale, they can just keep the money flowing in to take over, but it only benefits a few people, not everyone. It's not as if there's any sort of organized structure here to be "oh, let's all just employ people to build ghost cities one after the other so foreigners can park their money in empty real estate".

People like the IBM CEO are part of the problem destroying society. I do not applaud him or his peers. They are parasites with vast multi-million dollar salaries.

"IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and ex-exec-chairwoman Ginny Rometty were collectively awarded more than $38m in compensation for their services in fiscal 2020, a year in which Big Blue's revenues shrank and operating profit more than halved."

Not bad eh? 2 people got more than $38 million in a single year. To do what? Golf and attend meetings.