@hansw@mastodon.social right, but the cause of that is a too many people are underskilled and thus so many people compete for those jobs that the pay goes to shit due to supply-demand.

The solution still remains that people need more skills so there are fewer unskilled workers and as the unskilled worker pool shrinks the supply demand curve demands they be paid more, a living wage.

So the solution is the same if you have too many low-skill workers the solution is to have less

@freemo @hansw@mastodon.social
I actually don't think either of these solutions will work.

Minimum wage is a 90-year-old, depression-era solution looking for a 21st-century problem. It won't help the truck drivers, bus drivers, Uber drivers, UPS drivers, etc. who will soon be out of a job due to self-driving tech. It won't help construction workers, cooks, soldiers, barbers etc. whose jobs will be lost to robotics. It hasn't helped the retail clerks, educators, factory workers, journalist etc. who have already lost their jobs due to current technological disruptions.

The "let's retrain everybody" idea won't work either because there simply won't be enough jobs for everyone. Even many creative and highly skilled tasks will be automated by AI, such as medial diagnostics, music composition, art, acting, etc.

Also, I think the idea of punishing people with substandard assistance is inappropriate and assumes that people are only motivated to work because of the pay they get. If you had enough money to meet your basic needs without working would you just sit at home eating bon-bons and watching TV all day? Of course not. People are generally miserable when they are out of work not because they're not getting paid, but because they miss working -- being productive, solving problems, collaborating, etc.

The technological disruptions that our future will soon bring us are going to require radically different thinking and solutions, even about our most fundamental notions about work, play, economics and just generally how we live our lives.

@Pat

I dont agree with the whole "technology is automating things and therefore the world is facing a crisis and we need a solution".. to me this is bore more out the tendency for humans to see the time they live in as special and extraordinary and that the technology of their time is like nothing before it that will change things in ways too scary too imagine... something that every generation has thought for thousands of years.

The truth is "automation" has always been around and has always been quite significant replacing jobs in huge swatchs generation after generation and what we are seeing now is literally no different or exceptional, it just feels that way because what is new is scary and strange. and its hard to see it as equivocal to the technologies of the past.

As an example lets go back to one of the earlier examples of automation, though we never think of it as such, plumbing.. before plumbing thousands/hundreds of years ago there were huge armies of people whose whole job it was to either dig hole after hole for latrines or to shovel human shit into a cart and haul it away in the case of open-air toilets. This was very common around castles where open air toilets were the norm. Then one day plumbing cam around (different times in different places) and now all these people out of jobs.

We can say the same for farms as new hoes and plows and gas motors were created, the loom which replaced hand sowing, they even had complete automated looms. Hell the entire industrial revolution was little more than massive automation .

In all of the countless cases throughout history of automation, all of which were as significant as the ones we see in the present, it didnt cause an unemployment crisis in fact it caused a boom in economies where new more skilled people were the norm and every still had a job (though not always the same jobs) generation after generation... this is no different

@hansw@mastodon.social

@freemo @hansw@mastodon.social
Yes, what we are facing is somewhat analogous to the industrial revolution. But that WAS a revolution. It caused massive disruption and created a paradigm shift in the way people lived their lives. I think most people of that time couldn't image not working on their farm, not growing their own food. Then there were the political implications of having most people working in factories, which lead to the progressive era, labor laws and eventually to the New Deal. These were huge changes, the consequences which we are still dealing with today.

The changes that are coming due to our technological revolution will be just as consequential. Because the pace a of change continues to accelerate, it is difficult to have visibility about what is coming. Many of us have jobs that require us to continually relearn new skills, but as the pace of change accelerates, fewer and fewer people will have the natural skills to learn at that pace.

It's similar to the industrial revolution, but still much different and difficult to predict.

@Pat

Yes there is no doubt there will be changes, there already have been. But its not the scenario of automation taking over jobs resulting in some future world where need a UBI because no one can work or any other scenario..

The industrial resolution shifted jobs from being almost entirely menial labor into being more skilled, needing to know how to operate new tools and new equipment and those who couldn't were left in the dust.

This will be much the same, people will need to become educated and learn new skills and reach new heights of personal ability or else be left in the dust.. but the work will still be there, and more than enough of it, same as always.

@hansw@mastodon.social

@freemo @hansw@mastodon.social
The point is that since the rate of change is accelerating, it will require a much higher level of talent to relearn at the required rate of change, which will mean that many more people will be "left in the dust." So what happens to all those people? At some point the overwhelming majority of people will be "left in the dust."

@Pat

the rate of change isnt accelerating, it just appears that way because your in it. Every generation always makes tat claim. in fact by many measures its slowing down.

@hansw@mastodon.social