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Comment by version_five | Hacker News Reader

We need laws to prevent pawning off people we dont care about onto automated care. Everybody should be against this.

But we do care about those people, but if there's not enough people to properly take care of all people we want to care for, shifting some of the tasks (not all, that is not desirable nor possible) seems the best solution. Giving more care in total with the same amount of people.

In an ideal world, there's enough care for everyone, but in an aging population, that is not possible.

It's not care, it's pawning them off, it's the opposite of care.

Read Bullshit Jobs. An easy fix for countries with socialized healthcare would be to get rid of bureaucrats and hire front line workers that actually contribute something. Programs like this are the end-state of bureaucrat-run societies, where nobody who actually does any useful work is left.

The point of caring for someone is caring, through real interaction. It's one thing, if horrible, to force people to interact with a voice-menu system when they call in somewhere. This is like a nightmare version of that.

The fact that people seem to now think a chatbot that strings word patterns together is sentient will only make this worse, as the ignorant (just saw a sibling comment) will believe that "AI" will fix the problem, instead of actual personal interaction.

> Read Bullshit Jobs

Read my comment again

> hire front line workers

What if you already got rid of the bureaucrats, hired everyone you can and still don't have enough people? Pay more? Sure, but that also has limits in both the amount of people you can pay and the money running out.

Let those robot distribute fresh clothes and collect laundry, stock the fridges, clean the bathroom, all those menial tasks that allow people to have a decent life. Clear up the time from humans to actually interact with people.

I don't like the prospect of needing someone to wipe my ass when I'm old, I'd feel ashamed. Maybe not when a robot does it. Not sure about that yet, I hope that day is far far away.

By 2055, Japan's population is projected to fall to 90 million, with (medium fertility/medium mortality):

8 million being children aged 0-14

46 million being "working aged" 15-64

36 million being 65 or older

Population Projections for Japan: 2006-2055 Outline of Results, Methods, and Assumptions (PDF) https://www.ipss.go.jp/webj-ad/WebJournal.files/population/2...

Let's ignore the assertion that 15 and 16 year olds are "working aged" no matter how you allocate resources 46 million workers cannot support 36 million retirees.

Today there are around 3 million healthcare workers in Japan out of a working aged population of 80 million. In 30 years the number of retirees will be the same but the working aged population will roughly halve. This is just people working in hospitals, in-home care specialists are not counted. Nor are bureaucrats, only workers in 24 categories of direct-support healthcare fields are counted.

Human Resources for Health Country Profiles: Japan (PDF) https://apps.who.int/iris/rest/bitstreams/1147882/retrieve

There are already critical shortages of healthcare workers and in 30 years the demand will be the just about the same (most healthcare resources are consumed by the elderly) but the labor pool will be smaller.

If there were 0 bureaucrats there still wouldn't be enough people.

Many European nations face the same demographic challenges that Japan does, to a very slightly less severe degree.

Robots are one solution.

  If there were 0 bureaucrats there still wouldn't be enough people

Whether or not that's true, making the denial of basic human interaction the front line of creating "efficiency" is not the place to start. Not only is it dehumanizing, it encourages all of the wrong kind of behaviors, particularly administrative bloat, and ignores the reason we have social programs in the first place. If we've collectively decided we want to care for a group, we have to actually do it, not pay administrators to pretend it's being done.

Like your computer is pretending you're submitting a comment, rather than actually coming to my house to explain your point of view?

> Japan's population .. Robots are one solution.

FYI, the last episode of the "Tech Won't save us" podcast focuses on robots for elder care in Japan. Entitled "Robots Aren’t the Solution to Elder Care w/ James Wright"

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/robots-arent-the-solut...

Related to his recent book on the subject: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63199878-robots-won-t-sa...

This is the same problem healthcare has in general. There just are not enough healthcare workers to see to every person carefully.

Even if we massively raised the incentives and lowered the barriers for entry, the situation would still be nearly as bad. The human body is incredibly complicated and each person has a long medical history. Each person needs personalized care, but we can't devote 50% of the population to healthcare either.

The only viable long-term solution is automated tools. We're no-where near it yet (maybe in a hundred years) but gAI will eventually be our solution.

What's the alternative? No care at all? Devote all assets to only care for the elderly? End people's lives at 75 so we don't have too many old people to care for? Have forced labor take care of it?

The monetary system works by (a) government spending (b) lending from banks. The money from the banks pretty much just gloms onto the supply chain that grows up around the government spending… banks just lend to things that already have money, and the things that already have money before banks tend to get it from direct government spending. As debt is paid off, liquidity is removed from the system. Also as the filthy rich stock money into their hedge funds, it is also removed from the system for practical purposes. So without a constant inflation pressure, we instead get deflation. Now imagine if instead of supplying that inflation pressure by keeping a low interest rate for banks, we supplied it by spending money on an army of caretakers? Well you’d end up with people having money in their pockets for a change which would cause short term inflation like we just saw from the stimulus, but then once people had their needs supplied m, it would calm down and we’d just have more people employed. The downside for the rich would be that more of the population would have savings and thus be harder to manipulate. But i think lots of people would find more satisfaction at that than their current jobs, many of which only exist for the sake of “We need to create jobs,” or because of some bloated financial middleman industry we created through government spending that had lobbyists get in the mix

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