Atlas Smug | Alex Payne | Jacobin(jacobinmag.com) |
Atlas Smug | Alex Payne | Jacobin(jacobinmag.com) |
The answer is that everyone is going to own different robots. The whole point is that a robot is going to be so much more efficient than a human, that for less than 1/50th the cost of a median house a human could buy a robot that could create enough economic production for his whole life.
There will be challenges, since many people live paycheque to paycheque, but ultimately a very simple Basic Income (backed on land taxes, ideally) would catch those that would fall in the cracks.
I used to worry about robots a lot more, but I don't really anymore. The rich just want the poor out of the way while they become more rich / powerful. The most effective way of doing that is to just pay the poor people off while they start organizing greater and greater things.
The real thing I'm worried about is actually hard AI. I can't predict its motivations.
Edit: You guys fundamentally don't get it because you don't understand that I'm arguing about economics.
> This isn't a question of who is going to own a dishwashing robot. Its a question of who is going to own the means of production.
People are going to, at the very least, own their own means of production. Look at it from an economics standpoint, at the margin, why would I buy a chair rather than get my semi-intelligent android robot to cut down a tree, plank it, and build it. The chair would have to be essentially free. Then who cares who owns the means to production. At the margin I could always revert to having my personal robot build it.
Furthermore, I would argue that most of the computers that make most of the value in the world are owned largely by everybody. I have a computer that I use to make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on, and it will be the same with robots. People with vision will direct machines of greater sophistication towards and end they desire.
Whether you own something or rent it is always going to be a economic decision. I own my Macbook Pro and I installed Ubuntu on it, but even if I was renting it, that doesn't change the fundamental nature of what I'm saying.
I used to think that we were marching towards this awful grey future where 99.9% of people were going to be treated like cattle and ultra-corps were going to be running the world with all their machines. Most people talk like this is what's coming, and, barring AI, I no long think this is the case.
Edit2: I wrote my first edit when I had negative points, now it seems to have positive points, which is why I opened up the edit with "you guys don't get it".
You can manipulate bits and bytes at home, great, but these robots are industrial producers that make things, are subject to regulations, etc. This isn't a question of who is going to own a dishwashing robot. Its a question of who is going to own the means of production.
The funny thing is that your answer is antiquated. What computer do I really own? My android phone that is controlled by google, managed by a telecom carrier, and all of my data at google. Or all the servers I work with that are VM's at some cloud provider? We're not landlords anymore. We're renters.
This is why I like Plex instead of Netflix. Netflix has more movies after all, for a subscription.
An iPhone is a good example of a computer. Did you see this paragraph:
"I paid for my iPhone in full, but Apple owns the software that runs on it, the patents on the hardware inside it, and the exclusive right to the marketplace of applications for it. If I want to participate in their marketplace, Apple can arbitrarily reject my application, extract whatever cut of my sales they see fit, and change the terms whenever they like."
This is like complaining that your newspaper already has ink on it stating someone else's opinion. If you want it to be blank, buy a pad from an art store.
The critical flaw in your position is this: Any increase in personal productivity is meaningless as long as those in power can take as much as they want from whomever they want. Until this is solved, technology will never have an effect on the living standards of the average person.
> There will be challenges, since many people live paycheque to paycheque, but ultimately a very simple Basic Income (backed on land taxes, ideally) would catch those that would fall in the cracks
1) If they live paycheck to paycheck, they aren't going to have the financial resources to drop $6k on a robot. Even the boldest "Basic Income" proponents don't expect to provide more than basic sustenance to survive. Political realities are in line with that being the level of funding it would provide people.
1b) If basic uneducated labor is valueless due to being replaced with robots, many of those people who live paycheck to paycheck are going to move down to being on the dole and can't afford robots as well. Some people will be too old to have the desire to re-learn, some won't have the ability, etc.
2) Land taxes are simultaneously a tax on renters as well as owners since they aren't based on your ability to pay [profitability]. That means they'll be passed on to renters wholesale who in turn will need a higher amount of basic income to support it.
3) Basic Income has to be funded sustainable in a way that doesn't result in it eating its own tail. That probably will be income taxes on capital + payroll which will cause everyone to scream pretty loudly.
I don't see your utopia working with those assumptions.
Most of the computational power I have access to, I rent from Amazon...
Increasingly, much of the computational power is becoming decentralised anyway with the blockchain emerging in new and creative ways
I don't think economics works that way.
If the robot can "create enough economic production for his whole life" then either the robot will cost as much as the (present value of the) economic production for his whole life, or the cost of everything else will rise until the production capability of the robot is roughly equivalent to 1/Nth of her life. [Edit: Where 1/N is the proportion of 1/50th the cost of a median house to the current economic production of one life.]
"The rich just want the poor out of the way while they become more rich / powerful. The most effective way of doing that is to just pay the poor people off while they start organizing greater and greater things."
That's not how the psychology of power works, either. Or wealth. (You're not "rich", you are "richer than someone else"---wealth is only a goal when it is relative.) The rich don't have power unless there are poor handy to make do stuff. And historically, "just pay the poor people off" is the last option that anyone tries. Consider the French revolution and the 19th and 20th century class wars that resulted in the 40-hour workweek and unionization. (Hiring mercenaries to break strikes is cheaper than paying off poor people.) What's your opinion of unionization? Satisfactory way of balancing economic inequality issues, or economic atherosclerosis?
"The real thing I'm worried about is actually hard AI."
Actually, that's one thing I'm not particularly concerned about; I am familiar with computational complexity.
"backed on land taxes, ideally"
That is a brilliant idea! The economic value of the property I currently own is essentially nil. So, either my tax burden (such as it is) drops dramatically, or the price of property nearby does, as the skin-of-their-teeth farmers around get taxed out of business. I'd be able to buy my own fiefdom!
Oh absolutely. Instead we'll all have the option of owning any of a wide range of machines that can connect us all to the google and the facebook. So different!
And no, correlation is not causation. (The housing crisis of 2008 was not caused by deregulation, and there's a lot of blame to be shared across the political spectrum.) But it's hard not to notice over the long term that when the crazy leftists predict X will happen after a given massive act of deregulation and the sane rational libertarians predict Y, for the last thirty years we've almost always gotten X. And the libertarian response is always, "It's because you just didn't deregulate enough." Well, yes, that's one possible conclusion...
What all these anti free-market people are missing (intentionally or not) is that it makes no sense to watch the State create 20000 pages of regulations, and then yell "de-regulation" when they remove 7 of those pages. Especially when 4 years later they turn around and add another 3377292751 pages of regulation and the cycle repeats itself.
If you think that it's obvious, you clearly don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.
> it makes no sense to watch the State create 20000 pages of regulations, and then yell "de-regulation" when they remove 7 of those pages.
It makes no sense to use number of pages as a proxy for regulation (either for or against). You measure regulation by watching the big players exploit loopholes. The market allows all sorts of well-known varieties of cheating by default. Are the well-known traditional types of cheating still being used effectively?
http://chartingfinancials.wordpress.com/2012/04/27/us-bank-m...
Yep. Therefore they lack appropriate regulations. That's what we mean when we say "deregulation." We don't mean "the number of pages on the law books is decreasing, clearly we must increase it because more pages are better." That's a straw man, and you do everyone (yourself included) a disservice by invoking it.
Yeah, it's a symptom of the kind of elitism that modern day "leftish wing" / "liberal" types (as opposed to classical liberals) are infected with, where they believe that if only we'd let them micro-manage every little detail of society, the economy, culture, etc., then we could live in a "perfect" world where everyone is uniformly happ and "none suffer".
The thing is, that's never been possible and I don't think it'll ever be possible... and if it were possible, it's not desirable. "Uniformly happy" also means "uniformly sad" and "uniformly oppressed". None for me, thanks.
What baffles me the most if when they refer to what we have now, in the west as a 'free-market'. What we have is the end product of the social-democrat era of conflating big business and big government.
The relevant party is not "you," it's the typical consumer. They can't just buy a rootable phone and root it because they don't know what it would gain them. The opportunity to exploit this (very understandable and reasonable) gap in their knowledge falls, as it always seems to, with the people who own the means of production.
> This is like complaining that your newspaper already has ink on it stating someone else's opinion.
No, it's like saying that the fact that Rupert Murdoch has veto power over all stories with a national audience might have a negative impact on political discourse.
> If you want it to be blank, buy a pad from an art store.
Have you not heard of the concept "barrier to entry" or are you being disingenuous?
It seems to me that I'm not the one who's being disingenuous.
Should I expect everyone to be handed an audience on a silver platter? No, that's silly. What I do wish for is that competition is siloed so that leverage in one industry can't be used to arbitrarily dominate another. An actual implementation of such anti-trust policy might be a ban on discriminating against alternative app-stores. This is a very pro-market, pro-competition stance. It's not, as you seem to believe, some form of audience-communism (how would that even work)?
What you are proposing is government intervention to take that right away from people - to limit their choices.
We currently have multiple different options with different levels of corporate control, and the most popular operating system currently allows alternative app stores to be installed.
Your position is to limit the allowable contracts between both consumers and device makers and is strictly anti-market. Since the proposed remedy is already enjoyed by the majority of consumers, there is absolutely no justification for such a position.