I have trouble imagining a future where people don't want to trade their time for more goods and services. New phones, nice holidays. Especially with the advertising industry constantly bombarding them with messages about how their lives could be better if they just spend a little more.
A UBI paid for by taxing capital might help feed and house people, but I think people are always going to want more, and they will be unhappy if they can't trade their time for it.
I think the definition of 'work' here is work that must be done for day-to-day survival. It is not meant to include all possible enjoyable pursuits, like trading your time for goods and services. I don't think Wilde or the author or others wish for the elimination of all human creativity.
There's a big difference between 1) learning sciences or arts or anything at all for the purpose of improving your life (being able to trade your now-valuable time for other things, or simply for the enjoyment of the tasks themselves) and 2) working menial, drudgery tasks simply for the ability to purchase food and ensure a roof over your head one month at a time.
Many people I've met think that #2 is a required part of humanity; that if you do not spend most of your waking hours contributing something to society that you don't deserve to keep living. I think we need a societal shift in thinking to allow for a world that is coming, where basic needs for all ought to be met and our unique human experiences can be better spent - either with family, or exploring the cosmos, or building new inventions.
It hasn't really been possible before that we are so close to building a society where few human jobs will be required to sustain our populations' needs.
Yes, but the point I was trying to make was that I still think we will need an economy so that somebody will pay you study or be creative. Otherwise, what will you give the owners of the AI in trade for the new Phone / House / Holiday.
People will probably still want to trade about 30-40 hours of time a week doing whatever utopian pursuit pays best.
I think the transition from our current economy to this "post work" economy will be very interesting.
On the other hand, I spend a lot of my time working to pay rent and feed myself. I'm not even alive, mostly dead inside. What more do I want when there's no time to do anything with more stuff?
> I have trouble imagining a future where people don't want to trade their time for more goods and services. New phones, nice holidays. Especially with the advertising industry constantly bombarding them with messages about how their lives could be better if they just spend a little more.
This difficulty in imagining a qualitatively different future is what Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism". A changed society produces a changed population, and therefore a society without advertising will not have its members affected in the same compulsion as they are due to advertising today.
Let's say we have machines that will produce an unlimited quantity of any good that is currently on the market today. We put one in every house, since that machine can also produce copies of itself. Does this mean nobody have to work?
You still need doctors. You still need police. You still need yoga instructors. Plumbers. Somebody to fix your internet. And the need to pay those people means you will still need to find a way to earn money. Plus, land is still expensive because physics, and now that people can afford to pay more, landlords will charge more. Want higher density? Zoning is also not free. Nor are architects and builders.
All that happens is that goods are excluded from the economic system, but the system will keep going. The prices for still-limited services will simply go up to the point where you will still need to work 40 hour weeks to afford them.
This is already here to some extent, we have a rentier economy and the bigger it gets the more of a load it will put on everyone else.
I do wonder if rather than UBI we should be pursuing UBH (Universal Basic Housing). Cheap food is a solved problem for everyone but the very poorest, housing isn't.
Of course it is already here. I think this is in fact the core problem of Medicare and why costs are going up and up with no end in sight.
In the same vein, all that a UBI / UBH would do is shift around allocation of actually-limited resources while causing inefficiency, waste and accounting headaches for everybody. What's more, you'll be shifting those limited resources away from the most materially productive segment of society - the middle class - and onto the underclass, who is not going to all of a suddenly take over the burden of mass production, since that requires many years of education and training. So what I'm saying is you'll start to get goods shortages too.
The whole system is an intricate jigsaw puzzle with a billion moving pieces. People keep suggesting we fix it by hitting it with a hammer and setting parts of it on fire.
So what I'm saying is you'll start to get goods shortages too.
So is it better to build enough houses or enough Televisions? Right now the richest parts of the world are flooded with consumer goods but starved of decent housing. This isn't just a problem for the poor, I know plenty of high earning middle class people who have to put up with poor housing.
In the developed world we already have more stuff and kinds of stuff than most of us need. Reducing the supply of new mobile phone designs is not going to materially reduce anyone's quality of life.
A lot of the world just needs the kind of stuff we already have, and we already know how to make that stuff. As William Gibson said "The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed"
Yes, more than there already is. This is the standard thing that happens whenever there is massive redistribution of anything by government fiat. Stuff gets redistributed arbitrarily, people who need it don't get it, poeple who don't need it get too much of it, stuff is lost via administrative error or outright fraud or political finagling, people being careless with billions of dollars in other people's money because it's not in their KPI, etc.
Note that most things are not literally on fire currently and there is no looting. Those things are not guaranteed.
>In the developed world we already have more stuff and kinds of stuff than most of us need.
Really, now. Do you think we'll be OK if we stop the mass production of fertilizers and concrete for a while? Just a few months until things settle down? How about meds? Those tie up a lot of man-hours and medically trained people to produce, and we could definitely use those people elsewhere (or they could go take long, UBI-piad holidays).
Cheap housing is everywhere. The real problem is that cheap housing is useless if you can't find work and work has been centralized into cities so everyone ends up moving to the same locations.
I wouldn't mind a robot telling me my medical diagnoses and performing surgery on me. I would actually prefer a robotic humanoid cop over a human one if they are reliable so I don't have to deal with a cop on a power trip or one with twitchy trigger finger. Plumber, fix my internet, why would I care about a robot doing those jobs? Now I might pay for a human yoga instructor or a human therapist for their emotional side, but I think a lot of jobs I would be fine with if a robot did them.
Per land, while it is expensive in certain highly desirable areas, it is also cheap in a lot of places. A big reason people live on expensive land is because their job requires a bunch of people to all meet up in one location and thus everyone has an incentive to minimize their commute driving up demand. No job opens your potential housing locations in a massive way.
Unfortunately no job still does not get rid of the requirement to be near people to fully meet them. We'd need some sort of uploading technology or lotus eater level VR to skip that part.
But _do_ you need doctors, police, plumbers? Robots can handle all of these tasks in this hypothetical future. Even today, AI can better diagnose you than doctors can, according to the leading research.
Can they handle it now? Today? For the whole country? Because the problems are already here and people are advocating UBI so ideally we need those magical robots yesterday.
Your hypothetical either assumes that machines will never be able to be plumbers/doctors/yoga instructors, OR just takes a snapshot of some point in time between now and the eventual future when machines are superior at all work currently done by humans.
The former is incredibly short sighted and the latter doesn't seem super productive to me.
Do you have the robots today? Do you see them happening by the time the next government rolls around and UBI becomes a real choice?
As a reminder, suffering the problems of UBI for just a few years without an actual, functional, non-vaporeware solution in place is going to ruin a lot of lives and quite possibly burn down all our existing shit.
The context matters. Seen the democrat primary speeches? UBI is on the table. There's people in this thread right now advocating for it. The article is indirectly advocating for it. The whole thing is like advocating we drive 200mph over a bridge that hasn't been built yet.
This raises another point of discussion since I would say for most normal people the answer is no.
In this scenario any companies that exist would have to work really hard to make the work fun and fulfilling, which is not a requirement in most cases today. It would be interesting to see a world in which employers actively try to make work an enjoyable way to spend your time
Yes, but the work I would do probably wouldn't resemble closely what I do now.
If I have the comfort of being able to carefully choose rather than having to find anything to pay bills then I would try hard to find something that would allow me to enrich my community.
I've always wanted to work in assisting illiterate adults in learning to read but I have no teaching degree (doesn't pay well enough to support my family) and I don't have the luxury of time to seek those kinds of positions.
Yes. But not as much and not necessarily the same work. Had I had a guaranteed income I probably would have studied for another degree and that would have made me more productive.
One of the political problems with UBI for some people is that it promises to change the power relations between employees and employers. A person whose basic needs are guaranteed to be met regardless of employment will be more able and presumably willing to say no to a job that is unpleasant or dangerous or merely inadequately paid. Perhaps then people who perform important but low status tasks will see their income increase at the expense of the rest.
I suspect that UBI could be introduced more easily in Europe than in the US for this reason because in Europe (in particular Scandinavia) we already to a large extent work in order to live rather than living merely to work. That doesn't mean people are unwilling to work. I know plenty of people in Norway who are well past retirement age who still do substantial amounts of work. But none of them need the money, they all have decent pensions, they do it because they have skills that they like to exercise. Of course the money they get is a welcome bonus.
I see very little of that “machine-enhanced” future. Case in point: construction work (buildings, houses, roads) is still carried out by humans, and will likely always be.
Humans have shifted from subsistence and self-preservation to provide services of many sorts to each other, and most of the high-value ones are non-physical in nature (hold that thought!).
Toil is something that our society and industry has eliminated in mass-production scenarios, to be sure, but there is still a way to go - consider that ambulatory robots of almost any kind (except vacuum cleaners) are still niche affairs.
The main reason I wouldn't retire early on a very minimal income is that I think there might be expensive anti-aging treatments on the horizon in the coming 40 years. I would like to be situated to take advantage of those.
Personally I'm most happy about the fact that life ends at some point. Whatever I do, whether I waste my life (whatever that meant) or live it "meaningfully", at one point it wont matter any more. Don't get me wrong, I like my life more or less and try to live it "meaningfully" but constantly thinking about whether I'm doing the right thing at the moment and what will happen "in the future" is quite tiring.
I'm down for a world with "less" work but when I think back to the moments when I'm not working and they suck, I always get anxious and depressed usually start binge drinking and getting super fucked up. :/
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 95.2 ms ] threadA UBI paid for by taxing capital might help feed and house people, but I think people are always going to want more, and they will be unhappy if they can't trade their time for it.
There's a big difference between 1) learning sciences or arts or anything at all for the purpose of improving your life (being able to trade your now-valuable time for other things, or simply for the enjoyment of the tasks themselves) and 2) working menial, drudgery tasks simply for the ability to purchase food and ensure a roof over your head one month at a time.
Many people I've met think that #2 is a required part of humanity; that if you do not spend most of your waking hours contributing something to society that you don't deserve to keep living. I think we need a societal shift in thinking to allow for a world that is coming, where basic needs for all ought to be met and our unique human experiences can be better spent - either with family, or exploring the cosmos, or building new inventions.
It hasn't really been possible before that we are so close to building a society where few human jobs will be required to sustain our populations' needs.
People will probably still want to trade about 30-40 hours of time a week doing whatever utopian pursuit pays best.
I think the transition from our current economy to this "post work" economy will be very interesting.
This difficulty in imagining a qualitatively different future is what Mark Fisher called "capitalist realism". A changed society produces a changed population, and therefore a society without advertising will not have its members affected in the same compulsion as they are due to advertising today.
You still need doctors. You still need police. You still need yoga instructors. Plumbers. Somebody to fix your internet. And the need to pay those people means you will still need to find a way to earn money. Plus, land is still expensive because physics, and now that people can afford to pay more, landlords will charge more. Want higher density? Zoning is also not free. Nor are architects and builders.
All that happens is that goods are excluded from the economic system, but the system will keep going. The prices for still-limited services will simply go up to the point where you will still need to work 40 hour weeks to afford them.
I do wonder if rather than UBI we should be pursuing UBH (Universal Basic Housing). Cheap food is a solved problem for everyone but the very poorest, housing isn't.
In the same vein, all that a UBI / UBH would do is shift around allocation of actually-limited resources while causing inefficiency, waste and accounting headaches for everybody. What's more, you'll be shifting those limited resources away from the most materially productive segment of society - the middle class - and onto the underclass, who is not going to all of a suddenly take over the burden of mass production, since that requires many years of education and training. So what I'm saying is you'll start to get goods shortages too.
The whole system is an intricate jigsaw puzzle with a billion moving pieces. People keep suggesting we fix it by hitting it with a hammer and setting parts of it on fire.
So is it better to build enough houses or enough Televisions? Right now the richest parts of the world are flooded with consumer goods but starved of decent housing. This isn't just a problem for the poor, I know plenty of high earning middle class people who have to put up with poor housing.
More inefficiency than we already have?
> accounting headaches for everybody.
What headaches would they be?
> goods shortages
In the developed world we already have more stuff and kinds of stuff than most of us need. Reducing the supply of new mobile phone designs is not going to materially reduce anyone's quality of life.
A lot of the world just needs the kind of stuff we already have, and we already know how to make that stuff. As William Gibson said "The future is here, it's just unevenly distributed"
Yes, more than there already is. This is the standard thing that happens whenever there is massive redistribution of anything by government fiat. Stuff gets redistributed arbitrarily, people who need it don't get it, poeple who don't need it get too much of it, stuff is lost via administrative error or outright fraud or political finagling, people being careless with billions of dollars in other people's money because it's not in their KPI, etc.
Note that most things are not literally on fire currently and there is no looting. Those things are not guaranteed.
>In the developed world we already have more stuff and kinds of stuff than most of us need.
Really, now. Do you think we'll be OK if we stop the mass production of fertilizers and concrete for a while? Just a few months until things settle down? How about meds? Those tie up a lot of man-hours and medically trained people to produce, and we could definitely use those people elsewhere (or they could go take long, UBI-piad holidays).
Tell that to someone living in SV or London.
Per land, while it is expensive in certain highly desirable areas, it is also cheap in a lot of places. A big reason people live on expensive land is because their job requires a bunch of people to all meet up in one location and thus everyone has an incentive to minimize their commute driving up demand. No job opens your potential housing locations in a massive way.
The former is incredibly short sighted and the latter doesn't seem super productive to me.
As a reminder, suffering the problems of UBI for just a few years without an actual, functional, non-vaporeware solution in place is going to ruin a lot of lives and quite possibly burn down all our existing shit.
You're arguing timeline when that's not what the article is about. A world without work is our likely future, and it's worth talking about.
In this scenario any companies that exist would have to work really hard to make the work fun and fulfilling, which is not a requirement in most cases today. It would be interesting to see a world in which employers actively try to make work an enjoyable way to spend your time
If I have the comfort of being able to carefully choose rather than having to find anything to pay bills then I would try hard to find something that would allow me to enrich my community.
I've always wanted to work in assisting illiterate adults in learning to read but I have no teaching degree (doesn't pay well enough to support my family) and I don't have the luxury of time to seek those kinds of positions.
Essentially, "what I was thinking about before somebody came along and told me I had to earn a living" to quote Buckminster Fuller.
One of the political problems with UBI for some people is that it promises to change the power relations between employees and employers. A person whose basic needs are guaranteed to be met regardless of employment will be more able and presumably willing to say no to a job that is unpleasant or dangerous or merely inadequately paid. Perhaps then people who perform important but low status tasks will see their income increase at the expense of the rest.
I suspect that UBI could be introduced more easily in Europe than in the US for this reason because in Europe (in particular Scandinavia) we already to a large extent work in order to live rather than living merely to work. That doesn't mean people are unwilling to work. I know plenty of people in Norway who are well past retirement age who still do substantial amounts of work. But none of them need the money, they all have decent pensions, they do it because they have skills that they like to exercise. Of course the money they get is a welcome bonus.
Humans have shifted from subsistence and self-preservation to provide services of many sorts to each other, and most of the high-value ones are non-physical in nature (hold that thought!).
Toil is something that our society and industry has eliminated in mass-production scenarios, to be sure, but there is still a way to go - consider that ambulatory robots of almost any kind (except vacuum cleaners) are still niche affairs.
This dilemma always reminds me of Dunbar from Catch 22 https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/496826-dunbar-loved-shootin...
Personally I'm most happy about the fact that life ends at some point. Whatever I do, whether I waste my life (whatever that meant) or live it "meaningfully", at one point it wont matter any more. Don't get me wrong, I like my life more or less and try to live it "meaningfully" but constantly thinking about whether I'm doing the right thing at the moment and what will happen "in the future" is quite tiring.
So what does fair trade look like? How much forced charity is fair?