"Basic Income" is a terrible idea

[Glorious Leader]

Funny, I don't recall millions of people being laid off and the world coming to an end. What year was it again, when the sky fell?

Look, the left needs to get over this notion that a job is like a diamond: forever. Sometimes people have to get new jobs; it's just part of life. The world did not come to an end when the tractor was invented, even though at the time 97% of the workers in the world were farmers. It won't come to an end when robots become viable either.

Millions of people have been laid off or have been forced to accept pay cuts, part time Jobs etc etc. Funny enough the "left" or at least the Clinton democrats made the same argument you did. Get educated get better skills and training and it hasn't worked out all that well.

[Theinquisition]

What a welfare babby you are we should have just let you starve.

LOL

dude, it's not my fault that you are unhappy with your life.

It shouldn't be my responsibility to support you, especially if you have a self-defeating attitude. Find something that motivates you and go hustle for a dollar.

- - - Updated - - -

I think the point is that when AI reaches a certain point the vast, vast majority of people won't be employable. Will there be jobs requiring human input? For many more years to come. But with every advance that job pool will keep getting smaller and smaller and the population will keep rising.

what makes you think the population will continue to rise? Birthrates in developed countries are way down.

[Azadina]

The military as a whole in the us is a way for people not intelligent enough to make their own decisions. So they become government slaves for pay.

As opposed to being slaves for greedy corporations?

[Theinquisition]

Millions of people have been laid off or have been forced to accept pay cuts, part time Jobs etc etc. Funny enough the "left" or at least the Clinton democrats made the same argument you did. Get educated get better skills and training and it hasn't worked out all that well.

Well, unemployment is below 5% it seems to be working out fine.

Seems like the people who advocate basic income the most are the least likely to be paying into the system to provide it.

[PizzaSHARK]

I think the two are unrelated.

I don't like the idea of golden parachutes, however if a company is dumb enough o promise that to a CEO in writing, than they should have to pay it. You, as a consumer, have the right to not to business with companies that you find morally and ethically objectionable. If enough people do that, a company will either change their policies, or go under.

a good example would be the Wounded Warrior Project, a American charity organization that helps inured U.S. veterans. The CEO and COO engaged in some really unethical behavior and people stopped donating to the charity (it's huge). the board of directors fired the CEO and COO and are in the process of rebuilding the organization from the ground up.

Once again, I'm okay with Social nets that help people when they are down, but to permanently pay someone to not do anything for nothing...well, just rubs me the wrong way.

- - - Updated - - -



It bothers me because me, the tax payer, is footing the bill.

If someone is that lazy and or useless, they should just starve to death. Darwinism.

Didn't the Susan G Komen thing also run into that problem?

I like the idea of everyone having a basic income but I also don't see how that wouldn't just get horribly abused. Not even talking about professional NEETs, but criminals.

[Dug]

what makes you think the population will continue to rise? Birthrates in developed countries are way down.

Well not rise but it also isn't going to reduce in size at any foreseeable point bar extinction event. The job pool will still keep decreasing as the AI and robots learn to do everything outside of maintaining and programming themselves and even then that would be a possibility as they get better. At that point the only job is making sure they don't program themselves to turn us into slaves

[Theinquisition]

As opposed to being slaves for greedy corporations?

the irony is that he's trying to tell me I was a "slave for the gov't" while complaining the he doesn't barely have the motivation to wake up in the morning to do anything, much less get a job.

As I said before though, corporations are only as greedy as we let them be. Don't like a company, don't shop with them, its that simple.

[Glorious Leader]

^This

Someone has to maintain the robots. Someone has to engineer the robots. Someone has to program the robots. Someone has to dig the metal the robot is made of out of the ground. And it goes on, and on, and on..

The entire purpose of automation is increased effeciency. It would hardly be increased efficiency if you needed to employ just as many people to maintain the robots as their are robots. People will be unemployed by the millions, exactly as happened when computers began being used by business in large scale.

[Deleted]

lets exeggerate this to make the point more clear.


imagine we would finally succeed in "ultimate autmation" in the sense, that we would be able to build androids like, lets say, data from enterprise, but without consciousness, that is in fact able to do everything we can. lets say we have a factory that produces those in a large scale that needs 1000workers to somehow programm and observe the production.

now we must ask: if those androids can literally replace everyone but those producing them, who will then have the right to live?

basically 99,99999999% of the population then is "without work" but those 1000 people.

now we must ask: how do we now

redistribute

wealth in the country/world, and

does it have to be linked to actual labour?



i say in the long run we must unlink redistribution of (common) wealth (housing, food, clothes, etc) from a) money OR b) from the question "if you have labour" (so either give out money unlinked from labour, or give everyone wealthstamps)

the only other option is to say, only those 1000 people have a right to live and have all the wealth produced by their robots, which is basically the total abandoning of 99,9999999% of the human population.


just postuulating "there will always be jobs only done by humans" is maybe right, but you miss two points:

automation in the long run kills more jobs than it reproduces (that can easily be seen, if you make yourself clear about how many jobless are already there AND how many other people are there doing "useless stuff" as a job. like in bureaucracy.)
the second part you ignore is the fact, that even if more creative jobs DO arrive, those are "luxury jobs"
with luxury jobs i mean, that those are jobs, that only very few people will "buy" and actually pay for it, if at all.

i mean, americans for example are relatively fond of paying people for housework, gardenwork, sitting, nursing and packing your grocery bags, but im from a country in which you wouldnt find a sitting job ever, cause people "use" family structure for it, and do all gardenwork themselves as kind of recreational thing.

you see?

there are many many lies in our modern system, some are less obvious than others (tickle down effect is one of the better known lies) but this is defenetely one of those lies harder to spot, because the

real amount of job-less-ness isnt that visible, because we assume everyone having a job is having a "job", while 30% of population is already jobless, another 30% is "hidden" behind something looking like "employment", but really is just meaning and purposeless activity.

you know, we in germany reduced our unemployment significally, you know how?

we just hired 30% of the jobless, put them on the other side of the desk, now "managing" the other unemployed ,-) we call that HartzIV and Jobcenter.

[Theinquisition]

Didn't the Susan G Komen thing also run into that problem?

I like the idea of everyone having a basic income but I also don't see how that wouldn't just get horribly abused. Not even talking about professional NEETs, but criminals.

Well, I mean if they cut out all other forms of welfare permanently I think it would cut down on abuse, but hey...humans are creative, someone will find a way to scam the system, they always do.

[Dug]

Actually hell the population might rise. Not having to work leaves a lot of time for baby makin

[Paranoid Android]

Well, unemployment is below 5% it seems to be working out fine.

Seems like the people who advocate basic income the most are the least likely to be paying into the system to provide it.

Cheers for Obama!!! I thought the push back is that its much higher since people no longer look for jobs.

My argument about the 5% unemployment rate is that many are underemployed. Again working minimum wage job (difference of opinion to many), working multiple jobs, not getting enough hours for benefits and so on.

[Tijuana]

Millions of people have been laid off or have been forced to accept pay cuts, part time Jobs etc etc. Funny enough the "left" or at least the Clinton democrats made the same argument you did. Get educated get better skills and training and it hasn't worked out all that well.

It's worked out great. We used to have 97% farmers, now we have closer to 3% than 97% working as farmers (I have no idea on actual figures). How did nearly the entire population transition to other kinds of work without the doom and gloom scenarios being put forth in this thread? It's like people have no concept for what jobs and money are, and don't understand that as long as we keep making enough food for everyone, we are all fine.

[araine]

it is a very excellent solution to the problems we have

[PizzaSHARK]

the irony is that he's trying to tell me I was a "slave for the gov't" while complaining the he doesn't barely have the motivation to wake up in the morning to do anything, much less get a job.

As I said before though, corporations are only as greedy as we let them be. Don't like a company, don't shop with them, its that simple.

I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but slaves don't get benefits or payroll, right?

And I guess he's a slave to his depression or whatever fucked up shit's going on in his head /shrug

[Theinquisition]

Well not rise but it also isn't going to reduce in size at any foreseeable point bar extinction event. The job pool will still keep decreasing as the AI and robots learn to do everything outside of maintaining and programming themselves and even then that would be a possibility as they get better. At that point the only job is making sure they don't program themselves to turn us into slaves

I think by that point, we will have robots building permanent colonies on the moon and mars. The technical demands of advancing a "post earth" society will create a shit load of new jobs. We would be on the ground level of a new economy.

[Glorious Leader]

Well, unemployment is below 5% it seems to be working out fine.

Seems like the people who advocate basic income the most are the least likely to be paying into the system to provide it.

The official measure of unemployment is 5%. The real measure is significantly higher. None of this mentions the quality of those jobs or what kind of living standard they can afford people. Automation does necessarily just immediately unemploy people it has the impact of lowering qol form people who remain employed and also has the effect of crushing any thought they may have had about demanding a better living.

[Paranoid Android]

Actually hell the population might rise. Not having to work leaves a lot of time for baby makin

That is very true. More of a work force, especially women in the work force, is what creates people from having less children. So yeah, if people sit at home they are going to fuck.

[Theinquisition]

Actually hell the population might rise. Not having to work leaves a lot of time for baby makin

doesn't seem to be the case in many developed countries.

[Tyrianth]

Well, unemployment is below 5% it seems to be working out fine.

Seems like the people who advocate basic income the most are the least likely to be paying into the system to provide it.

Lol there is a damn good chance I pay more than you a year in taxes. Those of us who are for Basic Income don't live our heads burried in the sand.