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Comment by kourt | Hacker News Reader

"we would want as much of our population as possible in cognitively demanding positions, and having the ability to outsource labor to other countries helps that happen"

1) What if you had a brother with an IQ of 98. Would you rather he had a respectable factory job, or become homeless?

2) Are you aware that many of the least-tradable services are the least "cognitively demanding"? So I guess you want to tailor the bell curve of the population so that everyone is either > 120 so that they can do very highly cognitive work, or < 80 (so that they are content doing extremely menial work). Isn't it a little inconvenient that around 68% of the population is 85-115 IQ?

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I would rather that the respectable factory job is done by a robot. I don't think we should force humans to do repetitive work that can be automated just so that they can somehow justify their existence in a society that is obsessed with work. Our goal should be as little employment as necessary paired with a basic income.

Marshall Brain's Manna which has been mentioned before on HN is an interesting take on where automation and robots will take us.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

"will"?

s/will/may

Rereading it again. He basically foreshadowed Amazon warehouse workers. Though he may fall short on the leap from Amazon to the rest of the working class.

Interesting read. It starts off showing a nightmare scenario of capitalism gone wrong ... similar themes with the original Robocop movies (without the violence and gore). It finishes with a dreamy scenario of communism gone well, though it ignores many issues, hand-waves others, and ends rather abruptly.

It was interesting to see where one futurist believes we could go.

Ok, where are the money for the basic income coming from?

All the people getting replaced by automation will be less able economically to buy stuff, use services - and pay taxes. Automation removes a lot of costs, frees up a lot of resources and increases profits. But all those positive effects does not compensate for the negative effects unless there is real net gains. For most of the society.

A long term stable basic income would be paid for by an income tax + a wealth tax. Suppose you set those numbers at 5% income tax and a 0.1% wealth tax. Now today that's not going to pay for much of a basic income, however it's better than a farmer in 1800. Keep pushing effecency and your quality of life keeps going up.

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