"Will machines replace humans?" This question is on the mind of anyone with a job to lose. Daniel Susskind confronts this question and three misconceptions we have about our automated future, suggesting we ask something else: How will we distribute wealth in a world when there will be less — or even no — work?
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FIRST
First like
i love binge watching Ted talks
Wow, pretty boy hipster know all.
You’re jealous.
Ouch! take it easy.
Don’t judge on appearance, you probably know that right?
Ok so do you have an actual argument against him?
You appear to be a dorky, childish cartoon.
“Don’t worry, losing your job is a good thing” – this video
I don’t think that people who lose their job will not search for new jobs. You need to focus on the word basic, which means household and food. Which, about 700-800 dollars could pay for. But, due to our nature as humans we would allways want more. We would want that nice car, go to restaurants and whatever. For that, a decent job is required. MOST of people would look for new jobs. UBI is just a pitstop to the next job.
It is! We’ve been trying to eliminate work for all of human history, and now that we’re so close people are balking. When we don’t have jobs we are free to do whatever activities we like. Purpose can still be claimed from love, friendship, academics, hobbies, art, competition, etc. As for income inequality we will need new politics and economics. Technology will continue to encroach, whether you like it or not. In order to keep up and benefit, we must destroy obsolete social and political structures that do not address the current and future.
RussianRyme I am already dead inside so I dont mind.
Unbelievable I’m sorry I laughed. Hope you get better.
UBI would mean servitude
An ai apologist
Robotics and automation isn’t bad perse, but the gains only arrive with a small group of (wealthy) people. Hence the reaction of most people losing their job too automation.
Thomas Vanduren this is why we need Universal basic income and a maximum income cap. Until we get to a resource-based economy
A small group of people will gain from it, yes. It will further inequality, yes. But only up to the point to where we get self aware AI. At that point AI is no longer a tool which humans can control to their own advantage.
It’s like a transition phase.
If new job sectors are created at the same rate as population growth and job displacement then everything will be fine, if not….. Damn
Actually, the developed world has entered a period of negative population growth, except for massive immigration from the developing world, which is in line with the rate our jobs are disappearing.
mhtinla true true, that’s why I’m troubled by the current immigration policies in Europe and Western nations. It’s simply not sustainable
Yea, I think that is the worst part though as with the growth of AI increases the rate of growth of job displacement grows exponentially in a way that is not true for human job sector growth which to me shows almost a self-fulfilling prophesy that we will need to find some sort of solution. Hopefully before a global depression due to a lack of work than after.
TimedNovaHD our politicians conveniently don’t bring this up, gender pronouns get more news coverage smh
The poor will suffer like always and the rich will thrive.
Yes, most likely. But the poor in the future also gets to enjoy the fruits of automation, the same way the poor today enjoys the convenience of cell phone, something billionaires in the past generation cannot imagine.
Until the revolution… You can’t have too great a disparity before the larger numbers will remember the basic reality that voting works for the majority, and when that fails, war resolves so that the rich also become poor.
I do not know if I want medical doctors to be creative with their diagnoses
If you are diagnosed to only have 1 day left, you’ll want a second opinion.
Facing the challenge of Industrial Revolution, Karl Marx asked the same set of questions already — how to distribute the wealth as the pie grows? Well, we all know the result. So, good luck with universal basic income.
But, I don’t worry about these problems. AI is smarter than us and will solve them for us.
An EXTREMELY cogent analysis of the issue. I wish he had had more time to delve into the idea of Universal Basic Income. Allow me to chime in…
A Universal Basic Income, often called a basic income guarantee, could be provided with no increase in government spending, by replacing most existing transfer income programs and using the money previously used on them on the BIG instead. A basic income guarantee goes to everyone, rich and poor alike, and is progressively taxed back from anyone above the poverty line, so those wealthy enough don’t actually gain anything from it. It is this last that makes it actually affordable. The main benefit is that people do not lose the BIG if they get a job, unlike current welfare benefits which literally pay people to not work.
You take all the money currently allocated to welfare, unemployment insurance, social security, etc., all the transfer income programs in the country, including the money that supports their bureaucracies, you pool it. You divide the pool equally among every citizen of the country. You change the tax system to tax it back from those who are making enough to not need it. The taxed back portion goes back into the pool. This last is critically important and what makes the idea actually work. The large majority do not need it, and most of the rest would pay some of it back because the taxed back portion would be progressive. There is no ‘net’ increase in taxes. The numbers work out if done this way that a basic income guarantee in the US would work out to something around $800. a month. Existing money only, no new taxes except for taxing back the benefit from those who earn enough normally to not need it.
Poorer societies would simply have a poorer basic income, until their economies grow. However it would work equally well for poorer countries, as usually the cost of living is also lower.
Meanwhile, a basic income guarantee is a massive stimulus to an economy, not because of new money in the hands of the people (there is NO ‘new’ money), but simply because there would no longer be a disincentive to either work or be entrepreneurial for those who are currently paid to not work with the existing welfare system.
@Adrian
There would be no more pressure to raise the UBI than there is now to raise Welfare or Minimum Wage. Most voters would not need the UBI, as it would be taxed back (progressively) from those who are wealthy enough to not need it, which is most voters. For them it would simply be a more transparent social safety net. They would know they themselves would not stand to personally immediately benefit from raising it. To the extent that we do not have a $100. minimum wage, to the same extent we would be able to resist pressures to raise the UBI beyond what is practical and reasonable.
At the moment, we can afford with existing revenues to assure everyone of a basic sustenance wage, roughly equivalent to what they would otherwise get with the existing welfare system. I expect that within a few years as the system stabilizes, we would find that we could easily afford a bit more than that. Growth beyond that would depend on how much we grow the pie, not the share of it we devote.
That is the basic idea. If it proves in the future that 99% of all work is being done by robots, etc., a bit before that point, society would re-evaluate and likely go for a much larger UBI, which we would then easily afford. But that is a decision for a future time. In the mean time, this is what we can realistically afford. Moreover this will actually help improve the existing system well beyond merely providing sustenance income to those who would otherwise fall through the cracks, as it removes the perverse DISincentive to work of the current system, while subsidizing employment for the least employable, all without raising taxes. Not bad.
*@Peter* Good points, thanks.
What’s an American supposed to do with $800/month? Or are you giving them free healthcare, free homes, free transportation and free food?
Peter Cohen Sounds a bit like comunism 2.0 to me
Peter, thanks for the detailed comment. It makes a lot of sense. However, I note that your model is set in our current economy, not the future in which a large portion of the population is unemployed. It would be interesting to see how the pay out and cost varies with the size of the employed/unemployed segmentation.
On another note, I don’t know of any place in the U.S. where a person can live on $800 a month. We can cut expenses substantially by assuming universal health care and education, no need for private transportation or other “luxury” expenses like home ownership. But you still have a problem meeting rent, at least as it is priced today.
Universal basic income maximum income cap redistribution of wealth money out of politics the promotion of personal property and abolishment of private property until we get to a resource-based economy
Well… the CGP Grey’s video “Humans Need Not Apply” – is about a minute shorter and about a ton more informative. And it has more than 10 million views since it was published 3 years ago
Communism isn’t such a bad thing it’s the people who leaded it and fought against it were the bad guys
72 Anonymous Hydras the problem with communism isn’t the idea itself, but more about the requirement of a completely benevolent society. Every single person in ever part of the system would have to be fair. which in a practical sense, it’s not possible.
humans are the biological seeds of machines
He looks like handsome Squidward with hair.
The pie WILL get bigger, but you ain’t eating it.
14:49 if you want to skip to the “magical solution” this video is all about… (universal basic income! More power to the state! This is *so* complex and hard for people to figure out that we have to leave it all up to the ones who truly “get it”: Trump or Obama o/)
Answering the 14 minutes preamble more honestly, now:
It all fixes itself as long as people are able to perform voluntary actions. The problem in the speaker’s line of thinking is that he assumes that, because AI solutions will be “better”, they will automatically be more “valuable”.
If you understand that “value” is a fundamentally human and abstract concept that only makes sense to humans, you will see that “humanly imperfect” solutions will be preferred by other people and therefore more “valuable” even when worse.
When in doubt, look at how music works. The imperfect note A played on a flute by a man vs the perfect sine-wave note A of a synthesizer played by no one. The example is an exaggeration but enough to demonstrate the principle.
In short… the answer is freedom… with it’s sub-optimal consequences and all!
I am also a huge fan of liberty. Imagine what liberty meant to our ancestors: if you wanted to hunt, you could go out in the woods and hunt. If you wanted to farm, you could clear some land and farm.
But there are too many of us to survive by hunting now and all of the good farmland is already owned, and by a decreasing number of people and businesses.
So “freedom” today is different for the rich and the poor. For the rich, it is the freedom to accumulate greater or lesser aspects of the rentier economy (stocks, land, etc.). For the poor you are “free” to sell your labour to the rich or the corporations.
This isn’t freedom at all. Even Thomas Paine recognized this and it has only gotten much worse than that. You propose a model that is EVEN worse than that: not only must we sell our labour to those with money, we must also be entertaining and obsequious, because they won’t need our labour, they will just “dip into it” when it interests them.
Basic Income is a prerequisite for freedom in the 21st century. It is the opposite of greater government control of the economy: in fact, it is a basic prerequisite for geolibertarianism. Once we have it, we can shut down a variety of welfare and social engineering projects and fire thousands of bureaucrats.
People can and will still choose to work…choose….because they will have freedom.
Summary of geolibertarianism: “In continuity with the classical liberal tradition, geolibertarians contend that land is an independent factor of production, that it is the common inheritance of all humankind, and that the justice of private property is derived from an individual’s right to the fruits of his or her labor. Since land, by economic definition, is not the product of human labor, its ownership cannot be justified by appealing to natural human rights. Thus, geolibertarians recognize the individual civil right to secure exclusive possession of land (land tenure) only on the condition that, if the land has accrued economic rent, its full rental value be paid to the community deprived of equal access.”
No. This is a shill or a naive dreamer talking. The relevant model is Uber. They fully plan to replace human drivers with driverless cars. There is nothing in the plan to accommodate the displaced workers/drivers. They have no incentive to do so. In fact, they have a responsibility to maximize profit so they would be wrong, under the current model, to spend a nickle they don’t have to. It is exactly the same for all the other companies that will be automating. The end result will make the degradation and de-humanization of humans during the industrial revolution look like a warm up. But as with capitalism in general, there is an inherent contradiction that will lead to the collapse of the AI model in a consumer driven economy. People will have no money to buy anything.
The end result will be upheaval and a rise of the masses, who will demand a guaranteed basic income and universal health care. The elites will have to agree to this new distribution or come up with an economic model not based on rampant, unquenched consumption.