@icedquinn

IMO youa re conflating issues. There are absolutely concerns that labour needs to face, some of that is inequality when it comes to opportunity to make money. there are also concerns with automation in the sense that the new and better jobs they get involves training and if people are poor they cant afford that, so there are issues around ensuring these people have access to training at all.

But my point is the idea that automation is eliminating jobs and making human labour obsolete is a fictitious one. Its created jobs that replace older jobs, its just that too has problems.

@mur2501

@freemo @mur2501 AI is absolutely destroying jobs. Not "displacing" them. This is a topic of open research right now.

@icedquinn

Yes it is a topic of open research, there is no consensus that it is destroying jobs and not simply changing or replacing them. Some people hold that opinion who have studied and researched the matter, others do not.

It is not by any measure a settled fact. Though some people (like yourself) do hold strong convictions that it is undeniably true.

@mur2501

@freemo @mur2501

explain to me what jobs are created when the driver of the UPS truck is replaced by a fully autonomous delivery drone.

@icedquinn

Sure

• the team of 20 writing the AI software.
• The team of 10 doing CI for them.
• The server administrators that host the servers that push out updates.
• The network administrators across the country that need to maintain the networks to suppose the added traffic to support those updates.
• the car salesman who sell the car.
  *the mechanic who needs to maintain the systems of the the, ones that are very different than others so requires specialized skills at a higher pay.
• The electrical engineer who needs to design the circuit board that will run the drones hardware, including future revisions
• The mechanical and aeronautical engineer who needs to design the physical components of the drone.
• The artist who designs the logo and painting of the shell of the drone
• the drone operator or overseer (in the case of autonomous usually monitors many drones at once) who monitors the drones and ensures the fleet is operational.
• The chemists who are designing new battery chemistries better suited to drones since range is an issue right now and we need better battery density to make them more useful.
• The people working the mines harvesting the copper, the silicon and other raw materials for the drones
• The oil rig workers who need to provide oil to the plastics industry to produce the plastic for the drone.
  *The people who produce the plastic used in making the drone
• The team that tests the drones
• Regulatory agents and inspectors who review the drones compliance to FCC regulations
• RF engineers capable of designing the communication system for the drones
• Licensed RF operators to ensure the facility remains in compliance with FCC radio regulations

This is just the tip of the iceberg, the list of jobs are in fact so long I could probably go on listing people for some time.

@mur2501

@freemo @mur2501 everything you listed already exists.

@icedquinn

No, programmers exist.. programmers hired to work on autonomous ups delivery drones do not, nor has anyone specialized in that since they didnt exist before now.

All of those jobs are new people that need to be hired to support the **extra** resources needd to build and maintain those drones. While some of **types** of jobs arent new.. it does generate need for new **employees** to do those jobs since there are none to support UPS drones prior to UPS drones being invented... You cant take programs from other active projects, so you need to hire new people for the new initiative and that ripples all the way through the worker base creating additional jobs at every level.

@mur2501

@freemo @mur2501

Google has one of the most advanced server and database systems on the planet, which spans the entire planet. They only have ~100k employees.

USPS' drives trucks around a single country and moves boxes. From their website:
> The Postal Service has collective bargaining agreements with seven different unions, representing nearly 500,000 employees.

that's a pretty massive difference of people to "displace" in to .. what appears to be entirely technical jobs with qualifications those people do not posess and cannot posess as we do not even have provisions for retraining.

but i don't think there is a point to me replying further.

@mistermonster @freemo @mur2501

> because they have no foresight or imagination

well we do, i first heard of UBI/NIT from r/singularity talking about it. transhumanists and singularity seekers kinda have been discussing this problem for decades ahead of everyone else and its basically all the same.

you either have a massacre event to bring the population down to what jobs are left, you have a support system (UBI/NIT), or a radical redefinition of economics (reputation economy, time banking.)

it is not even necessary to make a "super AI." while there are some bots that have superhuman performance in set tasks, even simple human level performance is sufficient. hell, maybe even just "almost human" performance. for reasons like they never sleep, form unions, go on strike, die in accidents, skim money off the top, etc.

every job will, eventually, be destroyed.

this has been asked in the H+ circles in general. "what is everyone going to do when there is nothing left to sell?" and sometimes people answer "sell robots" to which the reply is "the robot makers will just sell robots to one another?"

@icedquinn
Maybe I'm a bit dismissive. I searched and searched for anyone to tell me a UBI plan that actually works, that isn't just slavery of one class or all of them. The usual answer involves something along the lines of "money is a circle", completely ignoring wealth. I did find one person who laid out a plan for a working UBI of sorts, but it is essentially nationalization of a resource (and the only resource that really can and arguably is de facto already nationalized) and paying dividends to "owners" of that government. It was written by the founder of the Pirate Party in Sweden and you can read it here https://falkvinge.net/2017/03/01/a-simplified-taxless-state-a-proposal-part-1/

I think a problem with a lot of proposals are short sightedness, engineer's propensity to ignore natural laws and believe everything can be engineered (such as "eliminating free markets" and other talk of this sort), and with regard to automation, refusing to accept that lowered costs in fact do result in lower prices in a free market.

You can automate every job and still have jobs for people. There will always be someone willing to pay a human for services, even if it is only novelty services or grey market economic activity. And as I pointed out earlier, when prices go down, costs go down, and if automation delivers on that the way it has the potential to (that is, if unions or other organizations don't force us to pay people to do things we don't need people to do) then the idea of every person working full time just to live will be as alien as everyone working 100 hours is to us now. You wouldn't need a full time job per person if everything was extremely cheap, working 10 or 20 hours a week might suffice if toothbrushes were 10 for a penny.
@freemo @mur2501