This assumes workers own the means of production.
Under capitalism, boss tells all the workers to get fucked.
That which ought to be is not influenced by what is. It’s true that worker control over the means of production is preferable to capitalism, but neither scenario here actually requires it. In fact, if the economy is fully automated, it would imply that the means of production couldn’t be owned by the workers, since there wouldn’t be any. That’s how you get post-scarcity space communism. Socialism would ensure the longevity and existence of an arrangement that results in automation leading to better lives for everyone rather than human extinction. However, I’m beginning to suspect that with the time frame we’re working with, aiming for socialism to the detriment of achieving any such arrangement might be a serious misplay on our part. Of course, that opens the possibility for humanity to be subjugated by an oppressive regime of immortal cyborg oligarchs. Even so, this horrifying possibility still preserves the opportunity for rebellion and revolution to set things aright whereas extinction would be ultimate defeat.
You just accidentally described both The Dune Universe, and The Warhammer 40K Universe.
Yay, a robot took over my job! Now I am free to closely monitor it until I stop caring about the mistakes!
Edit: And get fired!
Closely monitor it for less pay!
If I have no job, I have no money.
Who’s going to buy the stuff these robots are building?
The search for short term profits doesn’t give a fuck
That’s next quarter’s problem
it’s a monster and no one is in control of it. it must be destroyed.
Other rich people. Robots will just stop making $10k cars and start making yachts. Rich people will just keep the game going between themselves.
If people don’t have money, people can’t buy the goods being produced, demand will plummet and supply will skyrocket leading to the logical conclusion that a UBI is necessary to supplement life in an automated world. If that doesn’t happen, I Guess revolution?
revolution was always the answer. you think they’re just going to give up their place at the head of the table? they’ll figure out a way to wipe us all out before they do that.
last i checked robots don’t need a salary
Then how is my robot boyfriend gonna buy me gifts?
Well, if hypothetically all the work people don’t intrinsically want to do can be done by robots with no self interest, fatigue, or capacity for sadness, pain, it resentment… Then we need a new system that doesn’t require work to make a livelihood. Whether that’s a realistic scenario… Probably not in the medium term future at least. But as a hypothetical, that could make for awesome living if we could get there without screwing it up (but we will).
As difficult getting to a reasonable end game under those ideal conditions, tougher question is what about if we still need people to do crap work, but like 5% of what we need today. Who gets stuck with that? To what extent in that scenario could you approach a 2 hour work week to have more people share that burden?
Frankly I’m pessimistic that we would navigate those to a better system, but if we could pull it off and such hypotheticals happen, it could be awesome.
Believe it or not, that is a question that people are working on.
Automate your job but don’t tell your boss.
Automate, but maje sure you take ownership of the production and get paid accordingly. Your tip is usually the best way to accomplish it.
unless you can spin it into a business to business service that you can sell after leaving the company to many more and paid more than your job’s salary.
Ooh sorry that makes you a capitalist and no better than a landlord selling their housing services to people who want to live there.
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Woah, that’s dangerous thinking! Why don’t we bring back house-servants instead to give all of these filthy poors Gainful Employment™?
Or…we could say “fuck the poors, my house servant will be a robot”.
To be fair though I think that the really rich will find another way to use us for their amusement.
Well, they have robots for the actual tasks, the human employees are just there so they have someone to lord over.
Servants? That’s bourgeois-adjacent (/s). The reality is 80 % of people used to be farmers until the industrial revolution, so if we want to undo AuTOmAtiOn, in all likelihood your ass is either going to be wielding a hoe all day long or if you’re lucky you’ll be hand-spinning loom. Or to be even more pendantic, we’ll be starving to death because pre-industrial and pre-fertilizer agriculture cannot possibly provide enough calories for the current world population by a very long shot.
Or maybe the wannabe communists in this thread should remember that Marxism is about the value of labor and (this is where communists disagree very hard on the specifics) distributed capital so that advances in (e.g.) automation benefit the many instead of the few. The idea that “communism = no need to work anymore” is some new-age bullshit perpetuated by an illiterate disillusionment with capitalism coupled to a very incorrect perception that we live in (or close to) a post-scarcity world and the related tech-bro propaganda that “AI is going to replace us all” (it’s not, not in its current form nor the one after that, but it makes for a nice narrative to pitch to venture capital investors).
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Hard to blame this specifically on Capitalism because it doesn’t force working forever, it just doesn’t have a mechanism to prevent it. You CAN save all your money and retire at 40.
Democratic-Capitalism brings us the social safety net which usually DOES have a specific mechanism to allow for retirement at a certain age. So that proves those things are not incompatible, Capitalism isn’t working against retirement, it’s just not focused on retirement at all.
everyone here should look at the Venus Project. We keep struggling to understand how automation makes sense in a capitalist society. SPOILER: it doesn’t. The entire system has to be re-imagined or we perish and the owners flourish (without us).
Yeah the owners are always going to get the labor as cheap as possible. There is no way you’ll get profits from a. Company that literally doesn’t employ you.
In the right hand pic the person doesn’t work for the company. Why does the pic imply they do?
If a company is fully automated and has no workers do they pay everyone? Lol
“If a company is fully automated and has no workers do they pay everyone? Lol”
you lol but entertain this thought experiment - it’s a little stretch of the imagination but totally feasible in the right conditions:
a benevolent philanthropist buys an autonomous car and gives the car ownership of itself. the car’s directive is to operate at cost and provide transportation to humans. the car operates on a model not unlike uber but without profit concerns. it arranges its own maintenance and budgets for replacments parts, etc. how much cheaper would that be than paying for a cab or uber?
of course none of that is feasible because the law doesn’t allow for a car to own itself and there’s still some R&D before it could operate on the level i’m talking about but still… if profit was removed and everything operated on cost alone, how much cheaper and accessible would things become?
If corporations cared more about people and less about money this may just work.
Until there is no longer a massive bill to start a company this is a pipe dream. Who’s name is the mortgage under is all you have to ask before the model breaks down…
I believe AI will lead to more competition which will drive prices down for industries that require far fewer actual people. When an opportunity to make money presents itself, competition will thrive.
Selling to whom?
We talk about workers and customers and tax payers like they’re all different sets of people. They’re not.
so, workers and taxpayers are separate people, taxpayer is coded language for capitalist, because any time people mention taxpayer it’s always in relations to things concerning almost exclusively the rich
It may be used as coded language, but it doesn’t match reality.
The top 50% of taxpayers pay in 97.7% of the total taxes in the US. To be in the top 50%, you only need to make $40k. Full time at $20/hour will get you there.
Sources:
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/latest-federal-income-tax-data-2024/
https://www.usatoday.com/money/blueprint/investing/are-you-upper-middle-class/
I can’t access the USA Today article, sadly, but I can tell you how you got hoodwinked by the literal rich people think tank that is Taxfoundation, whose purpose is to try and fight taxation on the rich.
they obscure and heavily cherry-pick the datapoints they present, no, they actually did not state that “The top 50% of taxpayers pay in 97.7% of the total taxes in the US”, they said that “The top 50% of Income taxpayers pay in 97.7% of the total taxes in the US”, something that makes sense when you understand that almost half the nation earns below the poverty line and tax credits literally make them not have to pay taxes.
Secondly, it also completely ignores money you make outside income, stuff like the whole unrealized gains backing functionally zero interest loans, meaning that the wealthy aren’t even on that list to begin with
also, coded language doesn’t have anything to do with reality, that’s why it’s coded language, people seldom speak what they mean, especially those tasked with sellin’ you their snake oil.
We should tax every company the equivalent of all the workers’ salaries (adjusted for modern cost of living) they automate out of a job and use the money to fund a UBI.
I can only imagine what the cost of food would be under your proposed plan if implemented for all technological advancements over the past 500 years.
One of the biggest benefits of automation for the masses is that things get cheaper and more widely available. By maintaining the status quo and keeping prices high QOL would stagnate or decline.
Seeing how the US handles healthcare and social security is all you need to know about the future of any said plans for UBI. It’s a nice idea but the republicans are going to drain it dry the second they get majority.
I would also propose that any company where someone is making more than the cost of living is automatically garnished to the amount extraneous, again to contribute to UBI. Under this system republicans can’t exist because there is no corporations with enough money to bribe politicians.
So you’re saying no matter what anyone does for work they only make as much as it costs to survive? That is how I interpret “any company where someone is making more than the cost of living is automatically garnished to the amount extraneous”
So basically everyone gets paid the same no matter if they work or not. There’s no incentive?
Just trying to understand the logic.
I include regular luxuries as part of the cost of living as they often factor into a well balanced life, e.g.: vacations, etc. But yeah. The incentive is being part of a system where everyone lives comfortably and can achieve the basic goals of modern life.
Do you not understand employment taxes that businesses pay for each employee? Lol wow ur fucking dumb.
To be the devils advocate here, how would that system be fair to workers not replaced by robots? Like if im a plumber i still gotta put in my 40+ hrs/week but a factory worker just gets UBI now?
The thing about a UBI is that it’s universal. You’d get a UBI despite still working as a plumber. For you, it would be extra cash - for the factory worker laid off, it would be a lifeline.
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Everyone would get UBI. Nobody would be forcing you to keep your plumbing job. And even if you stuck around, you wouldn’t have to work 40+ hours plumbing weeks because UBI would give you the ability to chose what dmjobs youd want to take on. And maybe now that those factory workers aren’t stuck in factories, some of them might actually want to learn how to be plumbers, meaning more plumbers to take on jobs.
I highly doubt most people are just going to pick up a trade as if it is a hobby if they are getting a UBI
No, but plenty would pick up a trade to get more money, for the same reason that people still overwhelmingly seek full-time jobs instead of only part-time jobs in areas with low CoL.
I know this is a popular perception, but it doesn’t allign with the results of experiments where random citizens were granted an UBI.
https://www.givedirectly.org/2023-ubi-results/
Huh would you look at that, in the UBI experiments it actually gave people more freedom to do the kind of work they wanted to do.
A monthly universal basic income (UBI) empowered recipients and did not create idleness. They invested, became more entrepreneurial, and earned more. The common concern of “laziness” never materialized, as recipients did not work less nor drink more.
Mein gott, such a terrible policy.
Well, no, we’ve never been able to test UBI. That would require the entire population of significant geographic areas to receive UBI levels of income in a way they start believing it’s a safe thing to expect for the foreseeable future, and to model how it’s funded rather than just how it pays out.
What we’ve done is frequently means test the experiments, deliberately select low income people, but only a tiny portion of a larger low income population. Also, the participants know very well that the experiment might be a few months or a year, but after that they’ll be on their own again, so they need to take any advantage it gives them. So all the experiments prove is that if you give some, but not all, low income people a temporary financial benefit, they can and will out compete others without the benefit.
UBI might be workable, or it might need certain other things to make it workable, or it might not be workable, but it’s going to be pretty much impossible to figure it out in a limited scope experiment.
The Alaska permanent fund is about as close to UBI as we’ve gotten, but the amounts are below sustenance living so it’s not up to the standard either.
What we’ve done is frequently means test the experiments, deliberately select low income people, but only a tiny portion of a larger low income population.
So what you’re saying it we explicitly looked at the most extreme examples and seen how UBI has greatly benefitted the people in those extreme situations, and every single time the experiments are conducted the results are pretty consistent, but we can’t extrapolate that it won’t work in less extreme situations because… reasons…
Because you still have the element of differential compared to others. In true UBI, the UBI recipient would represent the ‘low point’ for any citizen. Let’s take Seattle for example as they recent had an ‘experiment’ about UBI. If you had true UBI, then 750,000 people would all get same benefit, of which 75,000 were unemployed. In the UBI experiment, 100 of that 75,000 people had the benefit temporarily, and have an advantage over 74,900 people without that benefit, and the experiment only influences 0.01% of the population in general and then only by a meager amount, so the general local economy won’t even register the activity as a blip. Those 100 people can have a breather but know that time is short. So they take advantage to maybe take a class, get nice interview clothes, and show up better prepared for a job than maybe the other dozen applicants that couldn’t afford to buy the clothes, take time off for the right interview, or take that class. They might not have any particular advantage if everyone had UBI, and the experiment measured success in terms of relative success over those not in the cohort.
So we are missing:
- What is the behavior if UBI is taken for granted as a long term benefit for the forseeable future, rather than a temporary benefit.
- What is the competitive picture if 100% of the population have the same benefit rather than 0.01%. i.e. how much of it was success owing to better resources versus success owing to others needing to fail to allow that relative success.
- What is the overall economic adjustment if 100% of the population has this income and participants in the economy may adjust
- What does it look like when the funding model in terms of taxation resembles what is needed in a UBI
Just like all sorts of stuff in science, at scale does not necessarily map to small scale observations. Especially in economic and social science. That’s not to say UBI is definitely not going to work, it’s that we can’t know how it will work/not work until done “for real” at the appropriate scale.
have you like, ever seen people in retirement? they start doing labour just to entertain themselves.
I’m probably a minority but i would in a heartbeat. I stopped doing residential AC because the bills didn’t get paid that often (people just don’t like paying bills) and honestly i couldn’t compete with larger companies while still having to maintain my epa certs, gas reclamation charges and the cost of refrigerant alone .
UBI is to cover the basics, its not going to let everyone live in luxury, you’d still want for extra cash, you just wouldnt NEED it. Thus people would still be willing to work
UBI is generally proposed as a basic sustenance income, a fairly austere lifestyle that is “enough” but likely not fulfilling.
Of course if you don’t have enough “work” to go around, that vision of UBI becomes pretty dystopian, as some people are stuck with bare bones living with zero opportunity for better. If we do get there, then that sort UBI isn’t going to be enough, but as you say it it’s too much and you still need human work some, well, is a tough question…
I would love to learn to weld, be a mechanic, electrician… basically all the things I’ve had to pickup up in a triage capacity. I would love to give up my 9-5 rat race job and learn to do something beneficial well. I can’t justify the current expense of taking 18-24 months off to go back to school though when I make enough to stay alive at this point.
You are probably right, but at the same time we might be surprised. UBI becomes the catalyst for this experiment to take off though.
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Tax companies a % of what they save by reducing head count. Salary, benefits, insurance, everything. They still save $, but not as much - they pay into a fund for UBI. And eliminate loan interest tax deductions for loans (totalling) over $X (some reasonable threshold that doesn’t penalize middle class mortgage holders).
And to the poster above, UBI is for everyone, so those still working get UBI plus a paycheck - that’s how it’s fair.
We are NOT economically prepared for the renaissance coming. And our octogenarian leaders don’t even understand how to set up a printer. Something’s gotta give or the economy will collapse. Some estimates are up to 25% of jobs in the next 10 years.
The basics of Supply and Demand. If automation means more consistent and bigger Supply, then prices will* come down and more of the Demand will be able to afford the goods and services in the Supply. Larger supply means cheaper prices, possibly to the point where value becomes basically meaningless.
*assuming that Supply isn’t artificially limited by the owners of industry to protect their own profits. If only someone wrote a series of books and pamphlets about how the owners would do everything they can to protect their profits.
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I’ll take “How to completely miss the point of what I wrote” for 1000 Alex.
I never said anything about anti-work* and I literally addressed the point about how high production and automation and plentiful Supply drives prices down.
*Which it seems like you’re assuming people won’t do any labor and instead it’s people won’t work bullshit jobs that don’t actually do anything productive and can actually more choose what they work on instead of working for the benefit of the industry owners
Well, the hypothetical is essentially a post scarcity “economy”, if there is zero demand for “work”, then work would have to be uncoupled from livelihood in some way.
A crap outcome would be to meaninglessly keep toiling at work that we could automate because we are afraid of dealing with consequences of a big labor surplus.
However, this is a hypothetical, and even if it starts becoming a reality, it’s going to be awkward when we can’t meaningfully have “work” for everyone but we still need work for some people.
I will agree that the hard core antiwork folks that say today we could get by with everyone only doing what they wanted for fun are unrealistic. However it’ll be… Interesting to see how we might navigate possibilities.
The folks that don’t want them building guillotines in their spare time. Remember kids, guillotines cure economic anxiety.
The highly automated factories?
Or you put in 16 hours a week, and some other people do the rest of the hours.
On the other hand, we could also train the factory workers to become assistant consultants, or give them some other bullshit job…
Please, no more bullshit jobs, we have enough of those to untangle
40+ hrs/week
Isn’t that the thing? We automatize so much and instead of getting the 20hrs/week, we struggel so much to improve efficiency. But for what? There are sectors I agree with that approach (like medicine, climate impact and so on). But if I have to use the same smartphone technology for 10 years or don’t upgrade to an 8k TV in the next 20 years, that is utterly fine by me, if that means that I’ll have to wrk 20hours less per week.
the devil’s* advocate
can != got to
I want fewer don’t wish to be there workers, not more.
Don’t give me that do-goody-good bullshit!
Many inventions created to “free people” ended up landing them with expectations to work even harder with their newfound “free time”—and they ended up being pigeon-holed into more limited jobs. This is especially true for women as appliances were created to help free them from domestic duties, but they have been landed into still doing those and working full-time or more.
this could be reality right now if we overthrew the owners. who keeps the owners in power? the conservative right. property is an unalienable right to them. what can we do? destroy the conservative right by any means necessary.
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If you make the person on the right to be the next generation over, this picture is pretty accurate. Take a simple example: watch repair shops have gone out of business due to electronics - that sucked for them, but we’re actually in a better place because of them.
Artisans being put out of work isn’t better for society. Watch makers were a type of artisan.
I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Would you think you’d be better off without electronics? Are you saying you’d rather live in a world where clocks were mechanical and you had to take them to a repair shop every now and then? Is your life worse because watchmaker is not a common trade anymore?
Would you think you’d be better off without electronics?
No. It isn’t a zero sum game.
Are you saying you’d rather live in a world where clocks were mechanical and you had to take them to a repair shop every now and then?
Some of them, yes.
Is your life worse because watchmaker is not a common trade anymore?
Yes. I wasn’t able to get my great grandfather’s pocket watch repaired.
No. It isn’t a zero sum game.
How can you prevent wide adoption of a cheaper and more reliable solution to a problem?
Some of them, yes.
There still are mechanical clocks. They’re just not that common. Or rather, they’re having a comeback as luxury/jewellery items since their functional aspect is not required anymore. And since they’re not a functional widespread item, the need for clock repair shops has reduced drastically. But there is a need for other type of repair shops for which the current generation of workers is well prepared and educated to handle. Hence my idea that the silly meme that we’re discussing is on a timeline rather than side by side.
Yes. I wasn’t able to get my great grandfather’s pocket watch repaired.
There are people who can fix those depending on where you live or how much you’re willing to pay. If you can’t find an artisan shop, try and talk to one of the big watch makers companies, they might help. When I needed something similar, Tissot pointed me to one of their local contractors in my area.
What a weird example
Gotta look into robot maintenance now.
