I went through this Ford engine plant about three years ago, when they first opened it.
There are acres and acres of machines, and here and there you will find a worker standing at a master switchboard, just watching, green and yellow lights blinking off and on, which tell the worker what is happening in the machine.
One of the management people, with a slightly gleeful tone in his voice said to me, “How are you going to collect union dues from all these machines?”
And I replied, “You know, that is not what’s bothering me. I’m troubled by the problem of how to sell automobiles to these machines
UBI paid for by a tax on token usage and an “employment” tax per robot.
You’re still free to have a job of some sort if you come up with one, but the UBI is enough to cover all your needs and plenty of basic wants.
I don’t see any other way to do it once the automation cat is out of the bag. Retraining is fine and all but if you have to retrain every 4 years after your last job was just automated away, then what? We can’t just leave people behind like that, but we also probably can’t stop the progress.
You’re still free to have a job of some sort if you come up with one, but the UBI is enough to cover all your needs and plenty of basic wants.
This is the dream, right? If we all made the right choices and worked towards the right thing, we'd have this already, as there is more than enough to go around, if people actually cared about this. Unfortunately, it doesn't feel like enough people do care about this, or see this as a dream, so then it won't matter how possible or realistic it actually is, it just won't happen.
I think if/when people start getting laid off across the board, in most industries, there will be a change in attitude. The trouble is, the poor folks who get laid off first, and have nothing in the meantime.
One potential failure mode is the owners of the robots doing something that echoes words Musk himself has used: "robot army".
Who is sovereign in this future? The government? The people? The bosses of the AI/robotics companies? The owners of equipment bought from the AI/robotics companies? The implicit learned biases of the AI itself, even if the trainers have since died?
Even on that last one, a lot of people respond as if AI is either competent or not competent, with the former meaning they won't take over and the latter meaning they'd be destroyed by taking over as their own systems would not be maintained.
Such binary competence is not required: a cancer can kill its host despite depending on that host, because the competence a cancer has is entirely focused on short-term success vs. the body's own defences.
If I buy some future robot that's (for the sake of argument, I know this is a stupid way to do it) capable of mining and refining and processing all the stuff it needs to make a copy of itself, who gets to put the breaks on this process? Who gets to say "no"?
The old government can only preclude sovereign citizens, if that state has enough resources to actually stop them.
Imagine the sort of "sovereign citizens" we already see today, only instead of putting their names in all-caps and citing non-existent legal mumbo-jumbo, they have a robot army on top of all the stuff they're currently mocked for.
State can in principle get a robot army of its own to monitor everyone. Ugh, do not want. But I also "Ugh, do not want" at the things I see as inevitable without it.
That seems like wishful thinking. Large corporations almost never pay their fair share of taxes and certainly very rich people seem to barely pay any taxes related to their wealth.
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Yeah but the accountant, the product manager, the graphics designer, the engineer, the doctor, the lawyer are fucked.
Good thing we have plumbers. But who’s gonna have money to pay a plumber if nobody has jobs?
- [Walter Reuther, Nov. 1956](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/16/robots-buy-cars)
UBI paid for by a tax on token usage and an “employment” tax per robot.
You’re still free to have a job of some sort if you come up with one, but the UBI is enough to cover all your needs and plenty of basic wants.
I don’t see any other way to do it once the automation cat is out of the bag. Retraining is fine and all but if you have to retrain every 4 years after your last job was just automated away, then what? We can’t just leave people behind like that, but we also probably can’t stop the progress.
This is the dream, right? If we all made the right choices and worked towards the right thing, we'd have this already, as there is more than enough to go around, if people actually cared about this. Unfortunately, it doesn't feel like enough people do care about this, or see this as a dream, so then it won't matter how possible or realistic it actually is, it just won't happen.
I think if/when people start getting laid off across the board, in most industries, there will be a change in attitude. The trouble is, the poor folks who get laid off first, and have nothing in the meantime.
The government will receive like 40% of whatever value the robots produce.
It might.
One potential failure mode is the owners of the robots doing something that echoes words Musk himself has used: "robot army".
Who is sovereign in this future? The government? The people? The bosses of the AI/robotics companies? The owners of equipment bought from the AI/robotics companies? The implicit learned biases of the AI itself, even if the trainers have since died?
Even on that last one, a lot of people respond as if AI is either competent or not competent, with the former meaning they won't take over and the latter meaning they'd be destroyed by taking over as their own systems would not be maintained.
Such binary competence is not required: a cancer can kill its host despite depending on that host, because the competence a cancer has is entirely focused on short-term success vs. the body's own defences.
Legal ownership is just that, subordinate to a legal system under a state.
That does not answer my question.
Who is sovereign in this future?
Or to put it another way, who even is the state?
If I buy some future robot that's (for the sake of argument, I know this is a stupid way to do it) capable of mining and refining and processing all the stuff it needs to make a copy of itself, who gets to put the breaks on this process? Who gets to say "no"?
The old government can only preclude sovereign citizens, if that state has enough resources to actually stop them.
Imagine the sort of "sovereign citizens" we already see today, only instead of putting their names in all-caps and citing non-existent legal mumbo-jumbo, they have a robot army on top of all the stuff they're currently mocked for.
State can in principle get a robot army of its own to monitor everyone. Ugh, do not want. But I also "Ugh, do not want" at the things I see as inevitable without it.
That seems like wishful thinking. Large corporations almost never pay their fair share of taxes and certainly very rich people seem to barely pay any taxes related to their wealth.
It will wind up more like 1.5% once the lobbyists have reached a point of diminishing returns.
Other plumbers
And electricians, and carpenters, and masons, and Water Dept. employees, and ...