Hacker News Reader

Comment by bjackman | Hacker News Reader

What could possibly by dark and cynical about that? This is the only way we can possibly deal with mass unemployment.

Also, 6 million people forced to spend their waking lives driving trucks is not a good thing. The thing that's good about that is the income they get from it. If we create enough wealth to give them the income without the truck driving... We won? That's the goal here. That's what the economy is _for_. Employment is the way the economy has always achieved that, but it doesn't meant employment is the goal, it's a means to an end.

View on HN

"This is the only way we can possibly deal with mass unemployment."

That or something like the Public Works Administration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Works_Administration).

(And you get infrastructure out of it.)

how about retraining people to give them skills the world actually needs. education, healthcare, child and elderly care. art and entertainment.

also science, research. as much as LLMs are able to do here, they can't do everything. and even with LLMs the more people we have doing research the faster we can progress technologically and also socially.

the real question is, who is going to make these investments?

It’s probably not the same people, different skills.

If I'm unemployed, hungry—I'm pretty sure I'll be happy to swing a hammer, hang drywall…

Your point is optimistic and consistent, I won't criticize it.

But you should know that it's a fairly narrow, political, and controversial thing to say that the purpose of the economy is to support people during unemployment crises. In fact it's so axiomatic that I really think it's worth calling out as part of the assumed solution not an obvious and foundational truth.

It’s not the purpose of the economy, it’s the purpose of civilization.

What makes us different than most types of animals is that we’re capable of supporting the less fortunate members of our species even through life-threatening situations.

I remember some archeologist saying that the first sign of civilization is not some tool or whatever but a healed fractured bone. That means the person that got hurt was cared for by other people who had enough resources to afford for one useless member of the group.

I can agree with that.

But don't assume it's without its own controversy. Maybe the point of civilization is to allow people to help eachother by providing safeguards against treachery.

Maybe they should be forced to help eachother under threat of violence. There's a massive spectrum of "solutions" between those two, and UBI could be considered pretty close to forcing, depending on how it's implemented.

It's not pedantry or technicalities, a lasting system needs to benefit people and support / build shared principles. Ideally it'd support the principles that enabled it in the first place.

The purpose of civilisation (or rather, why it exists in first place) is that “civilized” peoples managed to survive longer and reproduce more and produce better means to take over the land of those who didn’t adopt technology.

Now we are going to see if there is a limit or not. Or if AI changes the game (the dystopian end game is a small amount of people controlling all the production and getting rid of the rest by one way or another)

The optimistic "another" way is that anyone whose job is now obsolete finds a new job. Ideally within the same company.

(if you live in places with healthy worker protections, a company can't just fire someone, they need reasonable grounds; bar that, they need to first try and place them somewhere else in the company, and if that doesn't work, firing involves paying a severance fee. In an ideal and morally correct situation anyway, in practice they'll use dodgy corporate structures to bankrupt companies before paying or retraining anyone)

Assuming the company still gets some value from them. France has good worker protections but you can always just close shop. (And move elsewhere).

Another optimistic look is that there might just be more work, that otherwise would not be done.

For example we always complain about AAA games coming out riddled with bugs, now we have an opportunity to cut a significant portion of that if we also keep the workforce. Same with administrative tasks that take forever because it’s one person filing it for the whole country etc.

mankind has been created to carry forward an ever advancing civilization.

I didn't mean its job is to mitigate employment crises I meant its job is to give people (everyone) income/wealth.

I accept a significant amount of conditionality here - it's cool that people can get rich and live materially better lives by doing stuff that creates more wealth overall. But this is completely subordinate to the goal of making everyone's life better, i.e. I accept it exactly to the extent that "a rising tide lifts all boats". It seems the rising tide of AI may not automatically lift all boats though.

Anyway yeah your point stands, I realise this is not something everyone automatically believes. I'm phrasing it like a statement of fact just because I believe it so strongly.

> If we create enough wealth to give them the income without the truck driving... We won? That's the goal here. That's what the economy is _for_.

Assuming such wealth is created by the autonomous trucks replacing said drivers, for the same number of trucks, that would mean we now have to pay for 1 autonomous truck + 1 idle driver. This is more expensive than a regular truck driven by someone.

So either the number of truck increase dramatically or the replaced truckers find another value-creating occupation (or both).

Let's not forget that in a functioning economy, living and consuming goods _is_ value-creating.

I don't understand. Could you elaborate?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_of_a_statistical_life

I only skimmed the article but this doesn’t seem to say that loving itself creates value. This value is based on the expected earnings someone will still have in their life because it assumes the person will work. If you have a person that will live off UBI from the rest of their life, that’s not the case.

Just to clarify, I said "living and consuming goods creates value", not what you misquoted.

Thank you. I understand that we can put some monetary value on reducing the risk of dying.

How does that make "living and consuming goods" value-creating, exactly ?

I'm not sure if you're being serious, so pardon my skepticism and perhaps pedantry here, but in economic terms there is no value created if there are no people. Thus every person on the planet creates value if they are performing any economic activity. A simple analogy for this is that renters create value for landlords, as there is nothing to lend if there is no one to lend it to.

Perhaps you are looking for an explanation that relates to the abstraction of value that some folks keep simply at "only the people producing goods and services are creating value"?

Workers lose all political leverage in that situation. It's a short-term solution

On the contrary, since truckers also mostly all own guns, they have a lot of political leverage. Everyone knows this; in the US at least. Andrew Wang stated as much in a cnbc interview a few months ago.

If humans lost economic leverage (no jobs) but kept military leverage (usefulness as soldiers), that'd probably be utopia. We could all be a leisure class like the aristocrats of the past, and could defend that state of affairs.

Unfortunately we aren't in that world. AI+robots will deprive humans of both economic and military leverage. Most likely, powerful "blobs" of a few owner humans + a lot of automation will inherit the Earth and kick most humans to the curb.

>On the contrary, since truckers also mostly all own guns, they have a lot of political leverage. Everyone knows this; in the US at least.

What everyone knows is that American gun owners voted in the system that's eating them alive and that they don't care as long as that system doesn't touch their guns.

So they can just keep shooting watermelons in their backyards and being keyboard warriors on the internet, for as much as their "leverage" matters.

People keep saying that. But they can still vote.

For now! I am concerned with the coming robotocracy, where only the shareholders get a vote, and killbots guard the ballot box.

> This is the only way we can possibly deal with mass unemployment.

No it's not, but look at other countries with high unemployment and no UBI to see what the result is. Ranging from protests to migration.

>> That's what the economy is _for_.

Isn't it to extract every penny from as many people as possible to make few people billionaires?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com