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I agree with the premise that machines will increasing exceed our capabilities (and are improving quicker than we are). This seems so obvious as to be not deba

I agree with the premise that machines will increasing exceed our capabilities (and are improving quicker than we are). This seems so obvious as to be not debatable. I also think there are a lot of merits to online-education and Udacity seems to have the right general idea. On-line education needs to be more engaging and entertaining than simply videos and online collaboration. However, this whole "people need more skills" and "we need more jobs" meme feels like a losing fight with reality. In fact this push for increased human skills seems like it will only widen the gap between the uber skilled and the 99%. In our current economic model, this seems like increased pain for most of us. IMHO it would be much better if we could stop this denial. We need to pivot our economic system towards a basic income model. I think a much better strategy would be for us to start focusing our best and brightest on full automation of our needs and basic wants so that we can provide most essential services to people with minimal human and resource cost.

Mimu 11y ago
I agree with that. Not sure if the basic income is THE solution, I didn't think about it too much, but I agree with everything else. People don't need jobs, they need money. Jobs are the only legal way to get money but money is the issue, not jobs.
- afarrell 11y ago
  I'm honestly curious how many people on HN oppose mincome on grounds other than "we currently can't pay that much."
- filoeleven 11y ago
  > People don't need jobs, they need money. Jobs are the only legal way to get money but money is the issue, not jobs. People don't need money, they need a level of security in the basic necessities: food, water, shelter. Money is the primary legal way to get these things, but the basic necessities are the issue, not money. Basic income, or any good solution involving money, is pragmatic and worthy of consideration since money is so embedded in the culture, but when we are talking about real needs we're talking about physical needs, of which money is not one.
mathattack 11y ago
Many great scientists (Einstein amongst them) get into trouble when they veer into Economics. Einstein predicted social unrest from massive unemployment due to productivity improvements. Productivity improvements help people in aggregate. The question here is will a small subset of the world accrue all the benefit from the AI productivity improvement? One answer is basic income, presumably based on taxation of the rich. Is another answer some kind of universal ownership scheme of the companies creating the AI? I'm not advocating government ownership of business (this rarely ends well) but perhaps some way for the government to give shares in index funds in lieu of basic cash payments? Essentially equity based social security or welfare payments in lieu of some portion of the cash payments. I haven't thought this fully through yet, but it does allow some aspect of shared upside. (My sense is there will be a lot of shared upside anyway, similar to how we all benefit from free maps and search)
- hiddencost 11y ago
  Russia tried that. When the USSR ended, they gave every one vouchers to bid for shares of state owned companies. The little people had no idea what they were doing and got screwed brutally. It created many of the ridiculously wealthy Russian oligarchs you see today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia
  - nhaehnle 11y ago
    Interesting. The fundamental goal seemed a noble one, but it was badly implemented. Any lessons to take away? One immediate idea is some kind of vesting, i.e. you can't actually sell your vouchers for X years (or stages, being able to sell certain percentages after a certain number of years). A second idea is to encourage the formation of public interest associations to manage the ownership. There are already some non-traditional funds run with some social goals in addition to the goal of making money, perhaps that would help. (But I'm really just brainstorming right now.)
    - ambicapter 11y ago
criddell 11y ago
> We need to pivot our economic system towards a basic income model. So putting a floor on what people get each year seems like a pretty good idea. How about a ceiling as well? What's an equitable spread? 10x? 100x? Should the basic income given to residents of Manhattan be 2.5x what people in Wichita get?
- iamcurious 11y ago
  >Should the basic income given to residents of Manhattan be 2.5x what people in Wichita get? One of the main arguments of basic income, as opposed to unemployment benefits, is to reduce the bureaucracy involved. So the answer would be an empathetic 'no'. Hopefully, having a guaranteed income decoupled from location would push people to populate cheaper places. And thus, rent would get much cheaper overall.
  - criddell 11y ago
    > reduce the bureaucracy involved Basic income indexed to a geographical cost of living doesn't have to be a big bureaucracy problem. Plus, I think segregating by wealth is a terrible idea.
    - unabridged 11y ago
      Checking that people actually live where they claim requires a big bureaucracy. For 2.5x the money a lot of people would claim to be homeless living in Manhattan.
    - iamcurious 11y ago
      >Basic income indexed to a geographical cost of living doesn't have to be a big bureaucracy problem. See what unabridged said. >Plus, I think segregating by wealth is a terrible idea. Giving people more money because the rent is more expensive where they live equates to giving more money to landlords. That is an even more terrible idea. Besides, Manhattan isn't that good of a place to live. Specially when you aren't tied to the job market and can take more risks.
- 11y ago
bduerst 11y ago
UBI isn't the answer - there are goods and services with income-elastic prices that will be just as out of reach with UBI as it was before. A prime example of this is housing, which is why many government welfare programs stipulate what the delivered value can be spent on (food stamps, medicaid, etc.) as opposed to just open-ended income. Is it perfect? No. With every massive government program comes bureaucratic overhead - but throwing it out for something without the overhead but potentially economically damaging side effects isn't the solution.
JoshTriplett 11y ago
> However, this whole "people need more skills" and "we need more jobs" meme feels like a losing fight with reality. In the long-term, sure: if we can successfully build an AI smarter than humans, it's unlikely any job will survive. But at the same time, no job will need to; there's a balance there. Planning for a post-scarcity economy makes sense, but the plans that work in such an economy don't necessarily work when scarcity still exists.
- StavrosK 11y ago
  > But at the same time, no job will need to Why? Because this AI, which is basically just people smarter than us and getting smarter by the day, will decide that its only purpose in life is to serve its idiot masters?
  - JoshTriplett 11y ago
    Because if we build it correctly, it won't be a person at all, and won't have a value function orthogonal to our own. Building something that can self-improve and solve problems doesn't mean we need to build something that has independent will, motivation, or values. And it's a lot safer not to.
    - StavrosK 11y ago
      Sure, but "an AI that's smarter than humans" implies that. I'm sure we'll build many algorithms that are better than us at specific tasks, and we already have.
      - JoshTriplett 11y ago
        Even building algorithms that are better than us at any general-purpose task still doesn't require giving those algorithms agency or independent values of their own.
Florin_Andrei 11y ago
> In fact this push for increased human skills seems like it will only widen the gap between the uber skilled and the 99%. What happens is that pressure is simply increasing all the time, and people are on a bell curve w.r.t. how well they can keep up. We are effectively grabbing that bell curve and pulling its ends much further apart. We need a solution, otherwise things are going to get very, very ugly.

Mimu 11y ago

I agree with that. Not sure if the basic income is THE solution, I didn't think about it too much, but I agree with everything else. People don't need jobs, they need money. Jobs are the only legal way to get money but money is the issue, not jobs.

afarrell 11y ago
I'm honestly curious how many people on HN oppose mincome on grounds other than "we currently can't pay that much."
filoeleven 11y ago
> People don't need jobs, they need money. Jobs are the only legal way to get money but money is the issue, not jobs. People don't need money, they need a level of security in the basic necessities: food, water, shelter. Money is the primary legal way to get these things, but the basic necessities are the issue, not money. Basic income, or any good solution involving money, is pragmatic and worthy of consideration since money is so embedded in the culture, but when we are talking about real needs we're talking about physical needs, of which money is not one.

mathattack 11y ago

Many great scientists (Einstein amongst them) get into trouble when they veer into Economics. Einstein predicted social unrest from massive unemployment due to productivity improvements. Productivity improvements help people in aggregate. The question here is will a small subset of the world accrue all the benefit from the AI productivity improvement? One answer is basic income, presumably based on taxation of the rich. Is another answer some kind of universal ownership scheme of the companies creating the AI? I'm not advocating government ownership of business (this rarely ends well) but perhaps some way for the government to give shares in index funds in lieu of basic cash payments? Essentially equity based social security or welfare payments in lieu of some portion of the cash payments. I haven't thought this fully through yet, but it does allow some aspect of shared upside. (My sense is there will be a lot of shared upside anyway, similar to how we all benefit from free maps and search)

hiddencost 11y ago
Russia tried that. When the USSR ended, they gave every one vouchers to bid for shares of state owned companies. The little people had no idea what they were doing and got screwed brutally. It created many of the ridiculously wealthy Russian oligarchs you see today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia
- nhaehnle 11y ago
  Interesting. The fundamental goal seemed a noble one, but it was badly implemented. Any lessons to take away? One immediate idea is some kind of vesting, i.e. you can't actually sell your vouchers for X years (or stages, being able to sell certain percentages after a certain number of years). A second idea is to encourage the formation of public interest associations to manage the ownership. There are already some non-traditional funds run with some social goals in addition to the goal of making money, perhaps that would help. (But I'm really just brainstorming right now.)
  - ambicapter 11y ago

criddell 11y ago

> We need to pivot our economic system towards a basic income model. So putting a floor on what people get each year seems like a pretty good idea. How about a ceiling as well? What's an equitable spread? 10x? 100x? Should the basic income given to residents of Manhattan be 2.5x what people in Wichita get?

iamcurious 11y ago
>Should the basic income given to residents of Manhattan be 2.5x what people in Wichita get? One of the main arguments of basic income, as opposed to unemployment benefits, is to reduce the bureaucracy involved. So the answer would be an empathetic 'no'. Hopefully, having a guaranteed income decoupled from location would push people to populate cheaper places. And thus, rent would get much cheaper overall.
- criddell 11y ago
  > reduce the bureaucracy involved Basic income indexed to a geographical cost of living doesn't have to be a big bureaucracy problem. Plus, I think segregating by wealth is a terrible idea.
  - unabridged 11y ago
    Checking that people actually live where they claim requires a big bureaucracy. For 2.5x the money a lot of people would claim to be homeless living in Manhattan.
  - iamcurious 11y ago
    >Basic income indexed to a geographical cost of living doesn't have to be a big bureaucracy problem. See what unabridged said. >Plus, I think segregating by wealth is a terrible idea. Giving people more money because the rent is more expensive where they live equates to giving more money to landlords. That is an even more terrible idea. Besides, Manhattan isn't that good of a place to live. Specially when you aren't tied to the job market and can take more risks.
11y ago

bduerst 11y ago

UBI isn't the answer - there are goods and services with income-elastic prices that will be just as out of reach with UBI as it was before. A prime example of this is housing, which is why many government welfare programs stipulate what the delivered value can be spent on (food stamps, medicaid, etc.) as opposed to just open-ended income. Is it perfect? No. With every massive government program comes bureaucratic overhead - but throwing it out for something without the overhead but potentially economically damaging side effects isn't the solution.

JoshTriplett 11y ago

> However, this whole "people need more skills" and "we need more jobs" meme feels like a losing fight with reality. In the long-term, sure: if we can successfully build an AI smarter than humans, it's unlikely any job will survive. But at the same time, no job will need to; there's a balance there. Planning for a post-scarcity economy makes sense, but the plans that work in such an economy don't necessarily work when scarcity still exists.

StavrosK 11y ago
> But at the same time, no job will need to Why? Because this AI, which is basically just people smarter than us and getting smarter by the day, will decide that its only purpose in life is to serve its idiot masters?
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Because if we build it correctly, it won't be a person at all, and won't have a value function orthogonal to our own. Building something that can self-improve and solve problems doesn't mean we need to build something that has independent will, motivation, or values. And it's a lot safer not to.
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    Sure, but "an AI that's smarter than humans" implies that. I'm sure we'll build many algorithms that are better than us at specific tasks, and we already have.
    - JoshTriplett 11y ago
      Even building algorithms that are better than us at any general-purpose task still doesn't require giving those algorithms agency or independent values of their own.

Florin_Andrei 11y ago

> In fact this push for increased human skills seems like it will only widen the gap between the uber skilled and the 99%. What happens is that pressure is simply increasing all the time, and people are on a bell curve w.r.t. how well they can keep up. We are effectively grabbing that bell curve and pulling its ends much further apart. We need a solution, otherwise things are going to get very, very ugly.