Basic Income movement

[Fermion]

What about an AI to respond to message board threads for you?

 

[Fishingmn]

There is quite a bit of background and information on the Basic Income idea at this Reddit link - https://www.reddit.com/r/basicincome/wiki/index

Worth a look if you want to consider how it might look and what the supposed benefits would be.

 

[FUEGO]

On a related note, Japan has a robot farm in the news today - with an initial goal of producing 30,000 heads of lettuce a day and ramping up to half a million:

World's first robot run farm to open in Japan

Sooner or later there will not be enough jobs for everyone. Personally I think the minimum income is inevitable.

There will be more than enough jobs designing, testing, and installing those robots and building the facility where the robots farm.

Will robots ever develop the next disease resistant variety of lettuce to plant in those robot farms? Will they develop a better tasting, higher yielding lettuce variety?

I bet some humans will still be required in the production process. They might not be stooping to pick lettuce but might be splicing DNA sequences or upgrading the operating software to implement better cultivation techniques.

 

[soupcxan]

Yep. Remember the days of the secretarial pool?

Typing a letter myself instead of giving it to an admin is not an example of AI in the workplace.

Automatic monitoring of industrial equipment is a little closer to AI but still not really intelligence as I think of it, just following pre-programmed rules.

 

[marko]

On a related note, Japan has a robot farm in the news today - with an initial goal of producing 30,000 heads of lettuce a day and ramping up to half a million:

World's first robot run farm to open in Japan

Sooner or later there will not be enough jobs for everyone. Personally I think the minimum income is inevitable.

I'll bet THAT lettuce doesn't get contaminated with human e-coli. Chipotle may want to be their first customer

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I747 using Early Retirement Forum mobile app

 

[aja8888]

Robot-obsessed Japan has repeatedly turned to automated workers to fill labour shortages that are projected to get worse as the country rapidly ages.

Japan is building robots because of their labor shortage. China may face the same dilemma since they restricted child birth to one per couple for decades.

 

[youbet]

But the argument goes that those jobs were shifted to places like MSFT, Intel, Motorola, Google etc where the computers are made and the software is developed.

You can be assured that those jobs were NOT shifted to Motorola who now employs about 10% of the number of workers they did a decade ago.

 

[marko]

I have a concrete example of office jobs disappearing in my office, by my own hand. We used to have round the clock computer operators (Shift supervisor and 2 or 3 operators), monitoring computer consoles, responding to error messages, calling people to fix problems, submitting jobs, etc. .

You do realize that your example is about computer operators being replaced, right? Those people's jobs didn't exist at all a few decades ago.

I think the point is that there is always an evolution of work. The buggy whip people and the ice delivery man moved on to be telephone operators, who moved on to become "key punch" people, who moved on to become computer programmers, who moved on to become robot programmers etc etc etc etc.

There is a counter point however, where increasing regulations and laws make hiring a human more and more expensive forcing employers to get creative.

 

[haha]

I'm coming to this discussion late but thought I'd post some comments to consider.

I recently became aware of the basic income concept. In some ways it's not unlike Milton Friedman's idea of throwing money from a helicopter. That is, it may be more efficient to simply distribute money to society in a bulk fashion rather than parse the same amount of funds via myriad programs which may have large degrees of inefficiency and fraud.

More efficient no doubt. And for this reason, expect the "helping professions" and their unions to kill it while it's still in the cradle.

Ha

 

[Milton]

I have professional credentials that took years of sacrifice. When everyone else in their 20s was out picking strawberries in Spain and/or taking motorcycle trips across the country, I was working 40-50 hours a week and studying.

Dunno about long-distance motorcycling, but my understanding is that fruit-picking is a non-glamourous, backbreaking and low-paying occupation.

 

[FUEGO]

More efficient no doubt. And for this reason, expect the "helping professions" and their unions to kill it while it's still in the cradle.

Ha

After helping my in-laws navigate the medicaid/medicare waters I agree 100%. I'm fairly confident the welfare system's primary beneficiaries are the hundreds of thousands (millions?) employed in the bureaucracy of agencies and orgs doling out the $.

Don't get me wrong, as I encountered more nice people than dead weight in the "system", but I can't help but question the hundreds or thousands of dollars in time, postage, printing expenses, and overhead costs to process relatively simple benefits applications.

All those people would have to find other productive roles in the economy if the current mix of welfare were eliminated in favor of a BIG that piggybacks on the numbers on your 1040 (for example).

 

[FUEGO]

Dunno about long-distance motorcycling, but my understanding is that fruit-picking is a non-glamourous, backbreaking and low-paying occupation.

I don't think long distance motorcycling pays well either.

 

[travelover]

I don't think long distance motorcycling pays well either.

It worked for Peter Fonda.

 

[Sarah in SC]

I don't think long distance motorcycling pays well either.

It worked for Peter Fonda.

These two, FOR THE WIN!

And cue the 4 Yorkshiremen for Big Hitter, lol!

 

[FUEGO]

It worked for Peter Fonda.

Ewan McGregor found a way to make it pay too.
Long Way Round: Journeys - Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman's epic motorcycle journey from London to New York

Check that out, Sarah, if you haven't already seen it. That reminds me, I need to add Tabloid to my Netflix queue so I can check out my mountainfolk on TV.

 

[Sarah in SC]

Oh I'm in love with that movie. But honestly, I liked Charlie Boorman even more than Ewan in them. Less whiny Hollywood superstar.

Tabloid is great, about the small town NC beauty queen who caused a scandal in England when she "kidnapped" her Morman boyfriend.

 

[sengsational]

Now it is a much shorter end. You buy a item on eBay from a guy in Hong Kong. Or buy it from Best Buy, who got it from Hong Kong. The money, or most of it, goes directly out of the US and it is never seen again.

I hope they hold them as dollars as we inflate them to nothing.

I have yet to see a single job in my office replaced by anything resembling AI. Heck, if you put a simple macro in an excel sheet, everyone loses their mind.

I hate to break-up the motorcycle movie talk, but I'd like to proclaim that I, personally (likely), displaced thousands of workers.

Back when the PC came out, I wrote code that allowed 40 hours of work from a financial analyst to be done in 2. Across a single megacorp, I can only guess how far that went. Eh, maybe they found something else to do, but I kinda think, as cheap as they are, they trimmed the roles.

Then, in the last 10 or 15 years of my employment, I wrote and deployed applications that completely decimated the number of jobs in call-centers (put ordering on the web). This was across quite a few megacorps, so the number of jobs impacted wasn't trivial. And this is just me.

So you don't need "AI" to give people the opportunity to strive for that 15 hour work week!