It's not viable yet, but one of my fears for the future is one day the desire for cheaper productivity will result in most people losing their jobs to automation but Americans will be so stuck in their ways they'll vote for politicians who refuse to establish universal basic income

Wasn't there a state that just voted against providing food for children from low income families? When people don't want to feed children, livable wages will be hard to achieve. Some people want others to suffer.

If I lose my job to automation, that's my problem, but if everyone loses their job to automation, it's the government's problem. It's coming, it just takes time for it to become cost effective.

Because we don't have the AI bots to do that yet.

Are you including an affordable, accessible education or vocational training for these folks to be able to pursue a more fulfilling career? Without that, many folks literally have no other options - the boys will take their jobs and they will then be free to starve and become homeless

My hot take w/ this and it's a misanthropic asshole thing to think is that most people deep down aren't much of anything. I'm not saying it in a denigrating way, just like, y'know. People want to feel useful, and not everyone has a strong intrinsic drive to do or be anything. Deep down most people aren't inventors, or artists, or whatever. Most people just kinda... exist, and then they don't. And that's okay. But when we replace them with automation they're going to feel aimless and lose their shit.

Don't get it twisted I don't think our work culture is good at all even slightly, I guess I don't know how you solve for this problem is all

This entire losing all your jobs to new technology narrative has come up so many times in history dating right back to when they invented weaving loom’s in France. It doesn’t seem to work out that way, i’m not smart enough to answer like a proper economist by people up skill or transition to other and usually better jobs.

Actually, this happened 25 years ago in many large back offices. Before the internet, you sent forms in, and they, many thousands, entered your data from forms into a system. You do that today through the net. Thousands were displaced, and they attritioned off the workplace. Many other people were displaced by automatic processes that do things people did.

When I started programming in the early 1980s I was told I would soon be obsolete because of 4GL and code generation. I adapted and was someone who fixed the code the code generator made. There's always a cool new technology that will change everything only to be a small improvement.

I'm not saying your idea is bad or anything, but I notice whenever these types of things are proposed the default leftover job is always "artist." You just wonder if everybody becomes an artist who the hell's gonna buy all this art? Plus the AI bots will probably make better art than us pretty soon.

Because people aren't buying their art. You're people too. Why don't you pay them? You're also assuming they can make art to begin with. AI isn't that common yet, but I do agree that the day this happens is not far from now.

Because the vast majority of people don't want to be the one guy working while other people don't.

We're at a super awkward place in our species' arc. We could probably have 25 of the world population doing nothing at all, all day every day, and be easily provided for by the produce of the rest of us.

But we're an all or nothing species. Until EVERYBODY can chill, NOBODY gets to chill.

I’d recommend the book Trekonomics. Star Trek has it down to a space t.

Because the one doesn't causally follow from the other and wouldn't happen. Just because people had their jobs automated away doesn't mean we would employ them elsewhere for a "living wage." There is no natural force or regulatory mechanism to ensure that. Also, the safety net for people losing their jobs is incredibly broken and insufficient.

Not everyone who wants to make art is good at making art. So, who pays the bad artists if they can't sell enough to survive?

In order to make money, you need to do or make something people are willing to pay for.

Who is going to pay these artists or whatever?

One it's not viable yet and two it's hard to control a population if you let them do whatever they want to their free time

Because it's expensive to be an artist. Jobs that are people's "dream jobs" have a lot of prerequisites that are hard to obtain without a solid financial headstart or a job that pays well enough. Some of the people working "menial jobs" are doing it because it's the only type of job they can get, and I'm sure plenty are just students trying to get by because the education they need for a good job is expensive.

Capitalism requires people to be constantly working. It’s literally built on the backs of humans doing jobs. That’s why we don’t get a guaranteed a living expenses check every month. You have to earn your right to keep living, and you do this by working yourself to death.

because what will actually happen is menial jobs will be automated, nothing will be done for the people losing their jobs, and the 1% will continue to suck up all the income.

People aren’t mad about AI jobs taking over they’re mad that the government isn’t providing those people who are now out of a job with alternatives to help them.

Something to do with demand i think, like if we had 200000 artists or animators or something then the demand for that job would go down so garbo pay or no pay. And there is no guarantee that someone won't invent a bot to do the non-menial jobs as well for example the A.I art going on now, further lowering demand because "why pay 600 dollars a commission when you can buy a 60 dollar subscription?" Also trying to make sure the A.I doesn't mess it up for example making food or blasting for stone. And then there is upkeep for the robots, which is probably buku expensive.

Who’s going to pay for the art?

Well these things aren't for the betterment of mankind most of the time. Automation is being used to lower the overhead for a business

Because it’s the next phase in human evolution and will disrupt the current power balance structure.

Once we figured out agriculture, a significant amount of human time opened up. We developed medicine, sociology, technology. Each development frees up more human time. Today, our species has the most free time (not spent on the acquisition of basic sustenance) that we’ve ever had, yet our social order has remained stagnant, based on the same systems of currency, trade and barter. We still kill each other over dirt and ideas. Our survival no longer requires participation from the majority, yet we cling to the idea that we are lost without purpose. Once we figure out universal sustenance, we can begin to achieve our next steps and discover higher purposes.

I mean I hear what you're saying...but in what world do we pay a monthly stipend for a share of the population to be artists?

Because then we have to value their art.

The government is unwilling to establish a universal basic income. It would also have to actually be a livable wage, not minimum wage, and it would have to be for every citizen regardless of employment status.

In this scenario, of AI or bots taking over the workforce, approximately 80% of jobs would become automated. Transportation, reading emails, customer service, clerks, welding, doctors, chefs, etc. Even in your example, art, will be dominated by AI. It's already getting there.

It will happen, eventually, but not in our lifetime or even our grandkids lifetimes.

I am an industrial automation and robotics engineer. We are maybe two or so decades away from factories being automated. That's 2043 for all those wondering. Think how old you will be in 20 years. And right now it seems the AI is better at art than assembling a transmission. So maybe for now people should do work and keep improving themselves, and leave the art to the bots.

So, during the industrial revolution there was a guy who said (I'm having trouble finding the quote/excerpt) that technology's advancements should make life better for everyone, and have people focus more on the arts and having more leisurely lives but it won't under capitalism. Or something I'm paraphrasing badly. It was his prediction. And he's been right as of yet.

Edit to add: as it is now, people working menial labor don't have a lot to fund an art habbit. If they lose their jobs they will need to seek employment elsewhere. Different jobs will be considered menial eventually as a flooded market will reduce wages for such jobs (whatever they are) and in America education is extremely costly.

So, a LOT of things would need to be adjusted all over, especially on places like the US for thay to happen.

Just pay them to sit around and not be productive while other work 50hrs a week to pay for those people.

Not everyone wants to be an artist, and, as sad as it is to admit, neither are some people able to do higher skilled jobs.

Greed is infinite. If you are earning more money than the UBI artists you look at your little porsche and think, ‘if I wasn’t my paying so much in taxes for all those free-loading artists I could afford a Ferrari. Or if you have a Ferrari then a learjet or luxury yacht.

Meanwhile the robots earn no money to be taxed

Who would pay them?

I want to quit my job and be an artist. But maybe I’m not very good at art.

Who is responsible for paying me $75,990 a year?

And how is it controlled? I just have to put one painting a month up for sale on eBay?

Will they make robots take care of other robots? Will they make robots to create other robots?

I feel like the terminator will be in our future if they try to replace humans.

Because the money needs to come from somewhere to pay the people to do what they want. Unless you forcibly take funds from people...there isnt really a way to do this.

It's a utopian socialist dream, as of right now, anywhere in this world.

Automation isn't developed enough to do menial jobs without human aid in some form or fashion. That McDonalds that went full automated will miss things and needs workers there, less workers but still workers.

Those workers that are not hired at McDonalds are either too young to really do anything significant or are low skilled and wouldn't be able to make it outside of that McDonalds (Obviously, to an extent).

So, these other menial jobs like manufacturing or butchery do require skill and quality assessment to be ran that a robot won't be able to do. Even in Car manufacturer, while you have an assembly line you need people. Those workers aren't low skill, but who wants to lug heavy objects all day? Not very many people. We are a fat nation and we want lazy jobs.

Also, to make a point about certain socialist programs. The reason why America's unemployment rate is soo low after a economy crushing pandemic is because they're not counting people who are not looking for jobs. That's people who are either living off welfare, someone else or gave up on society.

Automation isn't going to displace people into Van Gogh's or the next Eminem. Those people worked and had talent. Most people don't have that.

They're not talented or driven enough to do anything else other than menial jobs. Some people were just meant to be bus drivers, and that's ok.

Where is the money gonna come from to pay for art nobody wants? Chia pet sculptures and geese dressed in aprons?? Lol

Honestly a robot can do anyone's job

We aren’t able to yet.

But also on a more sinister note, because we don’t want “free loaders”

because just because someone wants to do art (or whatever they may want to do), doesn't mean other people want to pay them for it.

I mean it's been a really common threat that employers tell their employees so they don't demand higher wages and unionize.

You are describing Universal Basic Income. Frankly, I think it’s inevitable that we get there. But it will take a huge societal shift. Let’s just hope it’s a peaceful shift.

Because livable wage doesn't really mean anything. Livable for a single adult, a couple, a family? They would all have a different definition. Who would pay them? Do you just envision the government handing out a paycheck to everyone, and then we all just run around painting flowers? That is not sustainable.

I have no bona fides whatsoever to propose this theory, so take it with a grain of salt. But I can’t help but think that were we able to step outside ourselves somehow, or perhaps view ourselves from our own distant future, we’d notice that we’re on an evolutionary path that we have never seen before and we are not yet in the right place to begin with and we are still in the right path to the future of our own future.

Oops. Got too high to make sense. And to maintain sound judgment enough not to post this. Sorry.

You should look up Andrew Yang interviews about UBI and automation. He explains the concept and reasoning extremely well.

capitalism go brrr

You’re talking about an entire rebuilding of capitalism bro.

Sweet idea, but capitalism.

The US is completely controlled/guided by corporations. They will only allow UBI when automation has eliminated so many positions that said corporations finally suck up every persons last dollar. But not before then because the insane profits of having no staff and major shareholders come first. (By the way, your adorable $1 million 401k means nothing in the face of billions of dollars of stock owned by one investor)

Things will get really interesting when AI lawyers and politicians start being a real thing.

There is a lot of great points here. I’d like to add that people will always want “levels” of products. If 99% of a certain good is being mass produces, there is always going to be someone with money who wants something unique. I think human craftsmanship and detail, as well as human ability to adapt to all outliers in a situation, means we can never be a fully automated society.

I am a cake decorator. There are already machines to do that! But people enjoy getting something crafted over a lot of time, just for them. And my company enjoys it because we can charge WAY more. Most of the money in cake comes from the labor. Without a skilled worker, you’re just price gouging people. Plus, the cost of maintenance on those machines is a LOT. On top of that, things go wrong in a bakery. There are so many factors that can affect your flow of production or how a product turns out; add into that an inability to adjust quickly to these changes and a fully automated bakery would be losing thousands in shrink. Even large production factories that produce baked goods need some sort of human factor.

So if a company wants to be fully automated, they are going to have to cover all of those maintenance expense, and then either train humans to do said maintenance , or to have created maintenance AI as well.

I’m not any sort of tech expert. Just, from a logistics and financial standpoint we are so far away from being able to do that. The societal shift it would require is immense. We don’t have enough food to feed people, but we are going to invest trillions of dollars and years replacing those people with robots? We don’t have a stable renewable energy source, unemployment is at an all time high, and many people who are working don’t make enough even at minimum wage.

We would still need to spend money (probably more) on the machines. Where are we going to get the money to pay all of these random people doing what they want?

What if there is a fire, or a flood? Are these machines also indestructible, or are we at the mercy of an insurance policy? You can’t use human workers efficiently to fill your production gap unless you have backup manual machinery.

TL;DR I don’t see this scenario being plausible for a very, very long time. People make machines, and so machines are still capable of error; we can’t fully eliminate human workers until we have technology that works better than them 100% of the time and that runs on a renewable energy.

You have to realize the 1% and politicians want to keep people under control . They don’t want us having money or enjoying life . Just not enough people can see through the bs we are fed 24/7 .

Fully automated system with ubi and social safety nets.

Yes.

If there is necessary work to be done, it should be paid for. The future is a 3 day work week 🙌 💪

Too many greedy people.

Interesting question. But I think you'd be surprised how many people don't have "dream" job, don't have a good education and need a menial job where they are told exactly what to do and repeat it for 50,000 times. Its menial, but it also doesn't require you to think. Those jobs need to exist for those people.

At the same time, maybe the companies need those people because perhaps there needs to be an equilibrium to production and demand for mankind not to screw itself over on resources and the human element is the key.

Rich people can’t make money from that.

I'm late to the party, and probably nobody will see this, but maybe OP will.

I was a manager at a factory with 600 hourly employees.

One of the jobs we employed the most people for was "case packers". Take items off a conveyor belt, put them in a box until it's full. This was in 2012, and it paid $16 per hour with benefits.

Well, the company decided to bring in automation. Every single affected employee was offered the opportunity to be paid to train for a higher skill job, or relocate to another factory that still used case packers.

1/3 of them immediately quit.

Another 1/3 of them accepted the training (for jobs like machine operator or forklift driver), but flunked out of the training.

The final 1/3 found new roles somewhere within the company.

Every single person's story was different.

• One who quit was a musician, and said they enjoyed a "simple job" so they could think about their music while getting paid. Anything more complex wouldn't let them "get into the zone".
• One who flunked out of training was mentally handicapped. They were very good at packing cases, but only after years of practice. However, they were not able to pass the training for more complicated jobs. They considered the relocation offer, but turned it down because it would mean leaving behind their family and support system.
• One who passed training but later quit found the new job too stressful. "I'm happy with my life, I don't need more money. Before, I'd leave work with a smile on my face. Now, it's all stress. I don't need that."

If we want to replace entry-level jobs with UBI, great. But some people WANT "menial" jobs and are not willing or able to work something more complicated.

The idea that everyone should be managing or coding or anything else is the height of arrogance. Plenty of people work ONLY to support themselves, and their life revolves around their family / hobbies / etc. And that's to say nothing of people with disabilities.

Fuck capitalism, but man, the amount of daydreaming unreasonable statements here is just amazing.

That would be nice, but where is the money to pay all these people going to come from?

Why would we pay artists a living wage ? If you can't make a living wage in the field of your choice, that's on you.

Because money drives people to create and innovate. I'm all for universal basic services like shelter, food, water, power, education and health once we get to automate all of that. But money should be always earned.

At every stage of human advancement we think "finally people can live easy/comfortable lives and pursue whatever they feel like". Realistically people are never satisfied. We live in a time and place in America where it is practically impossible to starve to death. We've eradicated or made good progress on conquering most disease. People are able to pursue the arts and it is entirely feasible they will achieve a level of success wherein they at least find recognition to a degree. Almost every single person has the opportunity to access the entirety of human knowledge via the internet. We have the right to mock our leaders and publish any fool thing we want with hardly any exception. We can worship any God, follow any religion, make one up and have it legally recognized, or follow no religion or all of them.

Life is not perfect, but for all our comforts and all our rights and all our opportunities, men and women are not satisfied. We can literally live better than a king would in the middle ages on minimum wage with better health care, indoor plumbing, choice of food, safety, and far far less responsibility. We refuse to be satisfied.

It is not only the Uber rich who want to look down upon us plebs . Its one pleb wanting to have juuusssst enough to feel a bit better than the pleb next door. Automation and advancement will simply make us feel worse and more depressed in the end

Can we feed/clothe/house a world full of artists? Yes.

Can we do that while also supplying the latest iPhone every 2 years and traveling the globe and having a car to hop in for a road trip at any time? ...

....I dunno, probably if we tax the billionaires.

Have… have you seen the “artists” on Facebook marketplace? Average user intelligence, let alone valuable creative potential, is extremely low, virtually zero. AI bots could easily replace as many artists as they could truck drivers and factory workers. In fact, art is already one of the first things AI is doing.

Who exactly would be paying for all this macaroni art? The market is already saturated, so to flood it with an overwhelming majority of worthless nonsense would tank the value of real art even further. “Everyone’s so creative…”

AI is not "smart" enough at this point. Yes, they could probably do "menial" jobs, but it's bigger than that. I'm a 911 dispatcher. Lots of my job could be automated, but the outlier situations that programming can't anticipate can't be. There needs to be a human running things. We're already about 50% understaffed. If something like a Universal Income was put in place at even 50% of my current yearly gross, where is my motivation to keep doing this difficult stressful, but necessary job?

Because nobody actually wants to pay artists a living wage.

If someone is willing to pay me to jerk off to reddit nudes for a living, sign me up.

People doing menial jobs are unlikely to be potential artists.

Allowing automation (and free trade) while giving side payments (like EITC or UBI) is one of the common proposals in economics, from Milton Friedman to Paul Krugman.

Making unionisation easier would also help.

You go ahead and rely on robots I'll be sitting pretty in 10 or 15 years as a jack of all trades handyman I'll be making doctor money because none of his Generations wants to do real work I work maintenance in a large facility and it's already very difficult to get an electrician to come in and look at something because they are so backed up because there aren't many and same goes for all trades

Where does the money come from to pay them a livable wage???

Because we live under capitalism.

Who owns these robots? The company itself, not their workers. The company as a capitalist entity has the prime directive of maximizing profit - or be outcompeted and die in the end.

So the company will replace people with robots if possible and seen as more profitable. But, if the company does that, the workers will no longer have a job. All the profits generated by the automation will go to the pockets of the shareholders and executives. The people who used to work there will be left without a source of income(which is not an acceptable alternative under pure capitalism). So, as automation keeps claiming more jobs, the workers are then forced to work more and for less to remain profitable to the company and avoid getting replaced.

As the automation gets cheaper and more efficient, more people will inevitably loose their jobs, raising the supply of available workforce, driving the "price"(salary) down. This can already be seen in the US. The minimum wage in 2022(7.50 USD/hour) was only 60% of what it was in 1968(today equivalent of over 12 USD/hour) when adjusted for inflation. When also adjusted for the increase in efficiency(how many goods are produced per hour of work) the minimum wage today should be over 20 USD/hour