I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century. The stream engine didn't do it, electricity didn't do it, computers didn't do it, the Internet didn't do it, and AI won't either. The truth is that as input costs drop, sales prices drop and demand increases - just like the paradox they referred to. However, it also tends to come with a major shift in wealth since in the short term the owners of the machines are producing more with less. As it becomes more common place and prices change they lose much of that advantage, but the workers never get that.
> I was with the author on everything except one point: increasing automation will not leave us with such abundance that we never have to work again.
That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.
What is interesting is the new things are cheap while the old stuff is now expensive. Average house in Australia is $1,000,000 while a TV is $500. The internet, social media, etc are cheap. Having someone repair your shoes is expensive.
Economies of scale were realized in the tv, but not the house. Maybe bc they aren’t realizable in housing, maybe bc regulation, maybe bc of the nimby veto, etc.
Well you can scale it, which is why housing affordability is higher in many places where the cities are actually far denser than Australia. There are perverse incentives not to though, property prices don’t rise (which is what investors want) if you actually focus on increasing supply.
Good quality Goodyear welted boots, adjusted for inflation, are cheap AF. I can get an excellent pair from Grant stone with horween leather for ~300 USD when on sale.
A pair of Nike jordans or air maxes is often in the ~120 range and made of far inferior materials.
Boots have never been cheaper/accessible before. The people that bring up repairable shoes don’t wear them or buy from shit brands like Thursday, doc martins, or timberland. You deserve your poor quality footwear.
Brand new boots are cheap because some child in a 3rd world country makes them. Having them repaired in my country costs enough to generally make it worth getting new ones.
>That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work
That's more because we are never given the chance. We only get to keep working or fall of the rat race and at best be delegated to Big Lebowski style pariah existance.
> That's because we prefer improved living standards over less work. If we only had to live by the standards of one century ago or more, we could likely accomplish that by working very little.
Is that trend still true? I can look from the 50s to 2000s and buy into it. I'm not clear it is holding true by all metrics beyond the 2000s, and especially beyond maybe the 2020s. Yes, we have better tech, but is life actually better right now? I think you could make the argument that we were in a healthier and happier society in that sweet spot from 95 - 2005 or so. At least in NA.
We've seen so much technological innovation, but cost of living has outpaced wages, division is rampant, and the technology innovations we have have mostly been turned against us to enshitify our lives and entrap us in SaaS hell. I'd argue medical science has progressed, but also become more inaccessible, and, somehow, people believe in western medicine LESS. Does not help that we've also seen a decline in education.
So do we still prefer improving our standards of living in the current societal framework?
Heck no. Given the choice most people would want to do remote work. COVID showed that we can actually achieve remote work, and suddenly many people realized they had a life they loved, without having to lose chunks of it to an unpaid commute that was baked into the cost of work.
Given actual alternatives, workers have made their preferences clear.
Culture also plays a part - America is uniquely mercantile and business first. Workers and citizens in other countries have made different choices.
> we could likely accomplish that by working very little
Yeah I know many people who do in the small town I live in. Mostly elderly who are used to it still, but also some young people who want to work just enough to buy what they need and not 1 minute more. I could've retired at <20 if I would've enjoyed that. Now I enjoy it more; it's kind of relaxing that kind of lifestyle; not because of not working but because of needing nothing outside your humble possessions.
What land prices? There's plenty of cheap land, it's just a bit far away from where most people live. But guess what, population densities were also lower a century ago.
> it's just a bit far away from where most people live
And now you need a vehicle which with its yearly costs adds up to the price of the land in the first place, because there are no trains, you can't ride horses on the highway and you don't have neighbors that are selling/trading what you need.
Sure, just like less desirable products of every category cost less essentially by definition. But that’s not really a retort to someone asking by why land prices have risen so much.
As long as the owner class can leverage, "Hey, that {out group} is sitting around doing nothing and getting free money!" we'll never have anything close to UBI imo.
I still like the idea of clawing back mineral and water rights and paying for basic services out of the money payed by industry for the right to dirty our air and water. As a citizen you're entitled to compensation for the smoke you're breathing.
People talk about how socially progressive Scandinavia is but they have a shitload of petroleum resources and that money goes into social programs.
I'd love to make companies pay for their products' entire lifecycle, including disposal and cleanup. It's not right that a company can manufacture future-trash, sell it, and then absolve itself of the negative externality when the customer throws the product away and off it goes into a landfill.
If a company's process produces waste, it should bear the entire cost of leaving the environment the way they found it rather than just pumping the waste into it. If a company's products are not reused, it should bear the cost of taking the used product back and restoring the world to the way it was before the product was built.
My quick look at Swedish exports shows that the largest export is finished equipment at 14%, fuel exports at 7.1, 4.8% wood and paper, 3.6% iron and steel, of which I'm sure a lot of that equipment is made. 3.4% plastics, which is just oil in another form.
It looks like you're right and their oil exports are all import/export rather than domestic, but that's still a good bit of mineral wealth.
Yes Sweden has non-trivial mineral resources, but nothing like e.g. China, Russia or Australia though.
The Scandinavian social programs are funded by high taxation. It is mostly a result of political prioritization, and not a windfall of natural resources.
There's been enormous pushback, pushes for privatizing (ruining) it, underfunding it from Congress, an absolute refusal to remove the criminally low income cap on contributions, etc.
Minorities don’t just get social security. People don’t get social security if they don’t work or don’t have a spouse who worked. They pay in to the system via payroll taxes. With UBI who is going to pay into that? UBI just seems like a pipe dream.
A lot of conservatives want to retroactively throw off non whites from citizenship because they think birthrate citizenship is disgusting.
Expect a real movement to reduce the number of citizens in this country. Specifically, if you can’t trace your lineage to a founding father (including for kids of Geman or iish immigrants), than they want you disenfranchised.
> I ain't giving people something for nothing
but I suspect you do, or would do that for your children or immediate family.
I'm just some dude on the internet, so my opinions are worth exactly what you're paying for them (nothing). But when I try to understand this type of thinking, this is what I come up with:
In the old days of scarce resources (vast majority of civilization), children were expected to 'repay' their elders for the care they received by taking care of them in their old age. And the competition for resources made this idea of keeping those resources for your family only important for survival.
But with the resources available today, the dynamics a very different. Currently only about 25% of total employment is in agriculture, worldwide. In the rich countries this is very significantly less. Canada is 1%, USA is 2% [worldbank]
But we're living with the cultural baggage of generations of scarcity and tribalism, which still shape our policy in a time of incredible resources provided by technology. So instead of more sharing, we choose higher standard of living for ourselves. I know it will take time to change this culturally - generations - but I'm still disappointed it's not happening faster.
I think it's hard for certain people with certain backgrounds to understand.
What I see as someone who grew up in a very working class family surrounded by those on benefits:
I see the janitor who busts their ass day in and day out to provide for their families totally lost in these conversations. They are expected to take money out of their check - doing a very difficult, thankless, and not all that well paying job - to even today help pay for a whole lot of people who are incredibly more privileged. I know quite a number of people who have college degrees but experienced "failure to launch" who see themselves as too good to go work in a kitchen, as a janitor, or what have you - but are quite happy to accept various form of public benefits due to their part time cushy employment.
I cannot square that circle. Having someone work themselves to a bone with no real hopes of retirement, so you can have other people live a much easier life than they are.
If you ask those taking said benefits who are working part time in a arts field or whatever, they will of course state that they are not the problem and "rich people" should pay more in taxes so the janitor also doesn't have to work. But now who is cleaning toilets or taking out trash? At some point the work has to be done and you run out of rich people to tax for wealth redistribution.
Considering how widespread this "condition" seems to be in my human experience, I cannot see a widescale implementation of "to each of their abilities, to each their need" ever working out simply due to how selfish humans appear to be. I love the idea - and I have often dream of starting my own commune of sorts of well-curated individuals who all have roles to play, but I just can't see it working out either in reality or in scale. The only reason such a limited scale commune might work is that you could rule with an iron fist and vote people off the island who start to take advantage of others and no longer pull their own weight.
I am quite convinced that if you implemented UBI or other means for the average person to never work you'd simply get a whole lot of people doing effectively nothing, if not outright destructive (for society) things with their time.
> Having someone work themselves to a bone with no real hopes of retirement, so you can have other people live a much easier life than they are.
But isn't the real problem that the janitor isn't being paid enough to save for retirement _and_ pay a 'fair' share of taxes? I read about the fear and complaints of high taxes to pay for the lazy, but the actual tax load on countries with strong socialist policies is not really all that much higher than in the U.S.
This sort of thinking reminds me of the old cartoon with three people at a table, one obviously rich person with a whole pile of cookies on his side of the table, and two other ordinary-working-class people each with a couple of cookies, with the rich guy saying to one of the other guys - watch out, that guy wants to take away one of your cookies!'
There are so many working class people convinced that the problem is the other poor people around them, instead of the very small number of people with > 50% of the resources. Those super-rich have somehow convinced everyone that the current balance is best.
I'm not some revolutionary; far from it. I've always hoped that technology would be the thing that allowed virtually everyone to rise up out of poverty (and it has to some degree), but what I've seen instead is the gains from all of this tech we've created in the past 200 years primarily going to a small class of people, and that just makes me sad.
> I read about the fear and complaints of high taxes to pay for the lazy, but the actual tax load on countries with strong socialist policies is not really all that much higher than in the U.S.
Many of these countries are going through the start of a lot of social upheaval in part due to these tax loads paying for social benefits that are simply not sustainable from a demographic perspective. There is an undercurrent of resentment for those who work non-enjoyable jobs and look at others who have it easier than them. This is from the blue collar/menial labor camp vs. the white collar/laptop classes who imo are totally and entirely out of touch with reality at this point.
> Those super-rich have somehow convinced everyone that the current balance is best.
While there is a little bit of truth to this, I don't really believe this is truly the case. Folks compare themselves to those around them, and socially speaking those you are in contact with are what generally matters from a societal standpoint. It's sort of like shoplifting. Sure, it's not "worth it" for any single retail clerk to take the personal risk to tackle a shoplifter vs. just watch it happen. But it's corrosive to society as a whole when that retail working a job they likely do not get much enjoyment out of is forced to simply stand by and watch someone just ignore the social contract and get ahead the easy/illegal way. So there is definitely truth to the trope of "don't defend a billion dollar corporation while being paid retail wages" - at scale it's incredibly damaging to society as a whole.
Same goes for living with folks on my block growing up who decided to take the easy route and loaf off the backs of others. In the end it's labor. You could redistribute the top 10% of wealth but you'd still have the same (or even more!) labor that would need to be done. Someone has to do it. Many kids growing up in that environment saw that and decided to not even put the effort in. Those who somehow rose above it almost universally escaped the poverty cycle.
I am not against taxing the rich more - but I'd argue that the systemic reasons why the top 10% or whatever control over 50% of the wealth of the nation need to be corrected before anything else matters. You can't really fix that with post-redstribution in my opinion. It needs to be fixed at the point of value creation so workers can somehow capture more of their labor surplus. Everything I've seen in life does not point towards "redistribute the rewards evenly regardless of personal effort or sacrifice put in" being a sustainable answer. This doesn't even work on a small scale in small companies - if management allows "lazy" workers to exist for very long, it becomes corrosive to the entire culture of the company and you eventually fall apart as those putting the effort in either stop or move on to greener pastures where they are not dragging others along via their efforts. Same goes with society.
> but what I've seen instead is the gains from all of this tech we've created in the past 200 years primarily going to a small class of people, and that just makes me sad.
This we can certainly agree on. Although I'll point out that the average HN poster is in this class of people.
Yes, I certainly don't think taxing the richer is the only dial available. that was my point about the problem being the wages - the labor or non-capital portion of the pie is one of the key things that needs to be adjusted. But the entire system is designed to reward the risk takers. I don't really have any answers. I'm just naively hoping that the the real wealth that technology creates (real-world efficiencies) can somehow benefit everyone, not only the risk takers. That's one of the scarier parts of the AI and robotics boom - it seems virtually all of the benefits are going in one direction. I know we've seen this type of thing before with the industrial revolution, and we somehow got to a point where most of us really did benefit with higher living standards (including the poorest) but it hard seeing most of the really rich ones not doing much to balance that out (most trying their hardest to keep the scales unbalanced).
The useless people you are talking about _are_ the ownership class. They haven't worked a day in their life like you have, they are getting all the loans they want, and they are paying them off with welfare (tax cuts and loopholes).
You can't afford an apartment because the ownership class is working very hard to keep housing prices high while paying you as little as possible for the two decades you have been working. Not because some disabled person elsewhere is struggling to get by on government loans and welfare.
The people keeping housing prices high are the leftist that push regulations that make it impossible to build while importing immigrants who disproportionately use welfare and get starter loans which they then use to push up housing prices without contributing anything to the economy. If this is the "ownership class" I guess stop voting for leftist. But nobody does, they just keep doing it, and housing becomes even more unaffordable.
The right wing here are the only people where I live with an actual viable plan for helping working people, even low class working people. The left makes deliberate choices that everyone knows will make things worse for lower class working people.
Even if we assume there are tons of jobless immigrants being ‘imported’ they would be renters, not buyers.
Generally, house pricing is primarily a supply problem. Removing immigrants will make this worse given that they are 30%+ of the construction workforce.
"There is a persistent myth that the United States lacks an extensive welfare state, despite all the evidence to the contrary. One look at this brief will disabuse you of any such belief. Total spending on means-tested welfare and entitlement programs climbed to about $3.4 trillion in 2023. About $823 billion went to means-tested programs such as Medicaid, SNAP, SSI, TANF, and refundable tax credits, while approximately $2.3 trillion was spent on old-age entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
Native-born Americans use an average of $7,134 in old age entitlements and $3,638 in means-tested benefits in 2023. By comparison, immigrants used $4,864 in old age entitlements and $3,370 in means-tested benefits. If native-born Americans had consumed the same per capita dollar amount of means-tested welfare and entitlement benefits as all immigrants, the total expenditures on these programs would have been about $715 billion less in 2023. That’s a tremendous savings, even for the federal government, considering it is approximately 42 percent of the federal budget deficit in 2023. We are tempted to suggest that native-born Americans should start assimilating toward immigrant levels of welfare and entitlement consumption.
Across nearly all major welfare and entitlement programs, immigrants consume less per capita than native-born Americans, but not uniformly so. They use much less Social Security and Medicare, but only slightly less Medicaid. Immigrants also use SNAP, SSI, and TANF at lower rates and lower dollar amounts per person, but those programs are relatively small compared to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Immigrants receive more per capita through the relatively small Earned Income Tax Credit and the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program. For the latter, immigrants use $3 more per year on a per capita basis than native-born Americans. Immigrants are less likely than native-born Americans to use any welfare program and, when they do, use fewer of them for a shorter period. The typical lifetime abuser of welfare was born in this country."
You also need a system that is ok with giving you some of said abundance without you working.
Last year the US voted to hand over the reigns, in all branches of government, to a party whose philosophy is to slash government spending and reduce people’s dependence on the government.
To all the US futurists who are fantasizing about a post-scarcity world where we no longer work, I’d like to understand how that fits in with the current political climate.
The thing a lot of people leave out is that literally billions must die for this to happen. In some fully automated world everyone except for a few tens of thousands of the owner class and their technicians will be unneeded. And then what to do?
How did you arrive at that conclusion? Dividing infinity by 1m or 1b doesn't matter if it's really infinite. Just make more machines to make the machines. The existential crisis happens afterwards, and people will kill themselves off without the need for any class warfare at all. In fact the owner class will die first since there will be no more conception of ownership, since everything is supposedly abundant and at your fingertips.
You really believe today's billionaire class will just give up their power over the populace? A world of abundance means the billionaires are irrelevant because everyone would have access to everything and they would never let that happen.
They will hoard the resources, land, anything that is needed for people to stay alive.
Your argument seems to be boiling down to, there's no point to improve quality of life because billionaires are just going to hoard all the improvements.
Surely the problem with that is the billionaires, not the world of abundance though?
It fits because now you can start up the conquering war machine and have a bunch of soldiers who're willing to kill in another country before starving in theirs
I am also fairly certain that if we do arrive at some abundant utopia where you can wish for anything can have it arrive, society will collapse. It's just bringing up 7 billion (probably more) spoiled brats at that point of time.
Work on its own is also a form of "social control". Idle hands are the devil's tools etc.
Imo instead of no-strings-attached UBI we should have something like the WPA. Spend ten hours a week or whatever working in local parks/schools/libraries/etc and get paid a basic living wage in return
Throughout history, big advances have come from humans having more "idle time", so we should be aiming for the population to be less busy as they can then hopefully focus on pursuing the arts or sciences.
Well, wars are going to happen anyway. If we abolish all idle time, it's pretty much the same as getting rid of artists, poets, philosophers, writers etc.
Throughout history, the hedonic treadmill has always triumphed. Competition and envy conjure their own objects.
Even if you want to allege that the proverbial pie will become infinitely large, any one person’s slice is finite. However big my neighbor’s slice might be, I can strive to make mine even bigger.
Humans being humans, they will find something petty and pointless to compete socially for or even kill each other for despite being provided infinite physical abundance.
I've met plenty of people that do this. They are contractors, they take on a contract, work for 6 months, take the next 6 off. I also know some tax accountants that do this.
See, we have enough food to feed the entire world, every year.
It's not our production capabilities that keep people hungry; it's either greed or the problem of distribution.
Automation will definitely amplify production but it'll certainly continue to make rich richer and poor, well, the same. As inequality grows, so too does the authoritarian need to control the differential.
Maybe we only have enough food to feed the entire world, because of greed. Every time we've tried to impose a system that spreads the wealth to the masses, rather than it resulting in equality, it has led to suffering and bloodshed. And ironically, in the Soviet Union and China, the death of millions from starvation.
This pattern suggests the remaining knowledge work becoming increasingly extracted upon by the owners of ai enabled firms, in similar fashion to sugar plantation workers across the global south. I would think the cost of doing so would be a level of social and civic unrest similar to the colonial revolutions (Bolivar for example) of the 19th century.
>such abundance that we never have to work again. We have heard that lie for over a century.
I'm 0.6 centuries old and have never heard that said for existing tech. Human level AI could presumably do human work by definition but that's not the case before we get that, including now.
Keynes was a different thing - that we could cut working hours to 15 a week rather than never have to work again. I think that would be quite possible with a drop of living standards - you could do it today by moving somewhere cheap and doing some remote work. I think it didn't happen due to human nature. We both quite like doing something useful with our time and like increasing living standards.
I inherited some money and don't need to work, but do work on stuff because I like doing it. I imagine that's what things will be like post agi.
Be careful not to conflate AGI with the current generative AI revolution. Even if it may eventually lead to AGI, it is quite a way from that and the social implications of the current and near term AI is what we are talking about. We can only imagine what this will be like post AGI, but we have some idea of what shifts happen when a technology comes along that greatly amplifies human labor.
Do a search for "the 20 hour work week". You will find plenty of articles from the 50s and 60s talking about how technology is going to make it so we don't have to work anymore. Popular Science was particularly keen on this but they certainly weren't the only ones.
All of those technologies of the past can be managed by humans. Once computers can manage themselves AND other technologies and people, I think it'll be a different situation.
If you want to live with no electricity, no running water, and a lack of refrigerated food, you could do so purely on welfare. In that sense, we already have the UBI that Marx predicted.
However, most people want fruits and vegetables instead of getting rickets, goiter, and cholera from an 1800s diet. Many are even willing to work 80+ hours a week to do so.
Most non-banana republics across the world define the Minimum standard of living as having all of the things you listed, meaning welfare/social safety nets provide for that. As they should. We’re not animals.
Correct. Of course, that wasn't the case in 1750 or 1900. It wouldn't have been possible then.
Hence why prior technological changes that increased productivity didn't result in living lives of extended leisure, despite some predictions to that effect. Instead people kept working to raise the overall standard of living to what could be achieved when using the new tools to their fullest extent. Doing more, not doing the same with less effort. As you say, we're not animals. We can strive for better.
I think that is part of the point, though. As our productivity increases, we don’t see an increase in leisure, instead we see an increase in what we consider the minimum standard of living.
So I can keep track of your wonderful comment, I'd like to add that looking up "banana republic", I realised Australia seems to fit that description perfectly! The latest crop they've come up with seems to be housing, but instead of fruit companies we have real estate cabals. With respect to the workers at the bottom of a banana republic, whats missing is the element of real choice. They say yes you can choose to not work harder but then you die early or suffer from disease, not much of a choice. Modern slavery is built on this idea of false choice.
I appreciate that Finland considers Internet access of a minimum of 1 Mb to be a basic human right. I am not sure if other countries follow, but I wish the USA did.
You’re not entirely wrong about bloat on modern websites, but if you griped about being unable to stream 1080p video to someone even just 15 years ago you would sound absurdly privileged
I’m not really sure the point you’re trying to make behind “as long as you don’t mind dying early and painfully from easily preventable diseases technically you can live in utopia”. Would you mind clarifying your position here?
