4 ms·

I'd imagine that people who need such picking jobs would rather have them around than not.

ethbro 10y ago
Isn't that the point of UBI? Getting us past the local maxima of "this job is soul-crushing and a waste of a person's intelligence, but economics make it cheaper to use a body than a robot"?
- peterkshultz 10y ago
  Fair. But a soul-crushing job is better than no job, and the question remains as to whether or not mobility into a job of equal requisite skill exists.
  - timv 10y ago
    > a soul-crushing job is better than no job Really? Do you mean: "Being paid to do soul-crushing work is better than not being paid" ? Or: "Doing soul-crushing work is better than having nothing to do" ? The first is an issue of income and the distribution of product (in the GDP sense of product). There is no axiomatic rule that says "you have to have a job to get paid", it's just how our current economy operates. If I owned a farm that produced a variety of food in excess of the needs of my whole family, but was totally operated by self-maintaining robots, would I need to have a job? The robots would produce all the food I need, and I could sell the excess in order to obtain other goods. I guess I could say my job was "farmer" or "grocery salesman" or "robot supervisor", but I wouldn't actually being doing work. If I am a truck driver, and I own my own truck and I make an income by transporting goods, and then I convert my truck to be self-driving so that I no longer need to be the driver, then (if we temporarily ignore external price pressures) I still make the same income as I used to. But I'm just reaping the benefits of my self driving truck, I don't actually "work" anymore (or at least to nowhere near the extent I used to). But if I am a truck driver, and someone else owns the truck and I make an income by being contracted to transport goods, and then they convert my truck to be self-driving so that I no longer need to be the driver, then I no longer make any income, and I'm screwed. The owner of the truck reaps incredible benefits, and I don't actually "work" anymore, but I also don't have an income. That's how things work in our society, but it doesn't have to be that way. There's no universal moral law that says that the first ex-truck-driver should continue to be paid for doing nothing much, but the second ex-truck-driver needs to get off his butt and go find a new soul-crushing job so that he can earn an income. As our economies change to produce more output with fewer workers, there becomes less useful work for the citizens to do, even though GDP is increasing. That ought to be a good thing (economically) - more "stuff we want", less effort to produce it. But it won't actually being a good thing for the general population unless we move to a different model for the distribution of income, so that there's a way for the populace to share in the increased productivity even though their manual labour is no longer needed. That where ideas like "Universal Basic Income" (UBI) come in.
    - lmm 10y ago
      > Or: "Doing soul-crushing work is better than having nothing to do" ? Are we sure this isn't true? Are people who don't have to work (e.g. those on permanent disability in the US) more or less happy than comparable people in dead-end soulless jobs?
      - timv 10y ago
        > Are we sure this isn't true? I don't know of any studies, but I suspect there would be some. In addition to the question of "how do we share income in a less-work world?", there is the question "how do we ensure that the are opportunities for everyone to contribute something meaningful to society?" Ideally those questions would connect - we would use our increased product(ivity) to fund a wider range of human endeavours that might not have been considered "economically productive" in previous generations. I don't know what that looks like, but I would hope it means more art and science, rather than more soul crushing, meaningless busy-work.
        ethbro 10y ago
        Or even, how many researchers are working at McDonald's because their families' circumstances didn't afford them other opportunities, including ability to further their education? Maybe not many, but I feel pretty confident that number is greater than 0.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        While it may be informative, one of the differences between UBI and simply expanding current welfare programs is cultural. Right now, being out of a job is considered shameful, and it's often isolating (since "everyone" else is working while you're not). Even in my holiday-friendlier (compared to the US) EU country, the fact that an unemployed person takes a few days from searching for work to go to the beach is met with scorn. One of the hopes of UBI is that when everyone receives a salary just from being alive, and working earns you extra on top of that, whether one works become more of a choice (like living frugally) instead of a failure, and loneliness is reduced when unemployment isn't an evil to combat, and more people choose to do something else.
- tuna-piano 10y ago
  I know many college graduates in their mid/late twenties doing various "knowledge" jobs. Many of them consider their jobs soul crushing. Most people don't like their work. Most people don't like waking up on someone else's schedule and do work that their told to do. That's why businesses pay them, after all.
  - sgift 10y ago
    And I always thought businesses pay you because you do something which they value, and that this is sometimes soul crushing is just a coincidence.
    - michaelt 10y ago
      Well, "Why would a company pay people to do this?" is a different question to "Why would a worker want pay to do this, rather than doing it for free?"
    - penguinduck 10y ago
      The more a person wants to do a job, the less compensation they will demand because the emotional satisfaction they get substitutes for a part (or sometimes all) of the compensation. When there are a lot of people who have a strong preference for doing a job in a particular industry, they collectively drive down the price of their own labor into the ground. Companies will only pay what they have to. Some examples of industries where tons of people work for shit money (less than a person of their abilities could earn in other industries) or even sometimes for free because of an emotional attachment to that industry are showbusiness, art and academia. Then you have the opposite examples, like working on an oil platform - most of those people would earn less money if they had picked a different industry, because they have to be paid more to agree to live on an oil platform and do a shitty and dangerous job.
- sbov 10y ago
  No, all you need are cheap robots to get past that local maxima. The point of UBI is to ensure people don't become destitute when we reach that point.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    Robotic automation of any sort doesn't occur in a vacuum. If 50% of the jobs in a field are automated, in the near term you still have 100% of the former labor looking for that job, pushing salaries down towards their minimum, thereby reducing the cost effectiveness of further automation.
    - apendleton 10y ago
      Though of course (without passing a value judgment on such policies) minimum wages set an artificial lower bound on the cost of human labor here, and this kind of low-skill work is inexpensive enough that hitting that bound is likely (vs., say, automating legal work), especially as minimum wages rise. For some industries getting to the point that near-100% automation is cheaper than $15/hour for humans is totally plausible to me.
      - ethbro 10y ago
        Exactly. The differences between minimum wage and UBI is fascinating, but I didn't want to bring it up above. To me, minimum wage says "if you work, then you should at least able to support yourself on your income$." UBI+ says "if you work, you must find greater fulfillment than mere sustenance in your work." Personally, I can't see minimum wage applying to anyone receiving UBI. Although it might make sense to have a "less than minimum wage" tax that helps fund the UBI directly. $ Abstracting away actual amounts and whether or not they're enough + Market adjustments aside
        sbov 10y ago
        At the same time, an UBI will make it so people still don't care to perform certain below-current-minimum-wage jobs. E.g. if I were on UBI, and I effectively earned $15/hour through it, I still wouldn't bother looking at jobs unless they paid, say, $5/hour or more.
noonespecial 10y ago
That people "need" awful picking jobs they hate doing but can be done better by robots is basically the existential problem humanity needs to solve this century or we are very likely to get Filtered, Robin Hanson style.
- franK_ 10y ago
  It's only existential in sci-fi books. Textiles were one of the first industries to be automated with the punched cards\power loom 150 years ago. We still have millions of human weavers all around the world. The problem with automation is you cant ask the robot why X, Y or Z is going wrong and how to fix it. A master weaver on the other hand will do it over a 15 minute conversation.
  - sgift 10y ago
    > The problem with automation is you cant ask the robot why X, Y or Z is going wrong and how to fix it. A master weaver on the other hand will do it over a 15 minute conversation. That's a very romantic view of weaving which hides the real reason there are still many weavers, mostly in low-cost countries: They are cheaper than machines. There is no guarantee that this will still be true in face of increasing computing capabilities and machines which learn better than before.
  - antisthenes 10y ago
    > We still have millions of human weavers all around the world. Yes, mostly in Asia, living in hellish conditions, often struggling to get enough food. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make with that comment.
- robotresearcher 10y ago
  The only reason those jobs exist right now is that humans are still much better than robots. Amazon is working on pick/pack robots in the hope of changing that.

Isn't that the point of UBI? Getting us past the local maxima of "this job is soul-crushing and a waste of a person's intelligence, but economics make it cheaper to use a body than a robot"?

peterkshultz 10y ago
Fair. But a soul-crushing job is better than no job, and the question remains as to whether or not mobility into a job of equal requisite skill exists.
- timv 10y ago
  > a soul-crushing job is better than no job Really? Do you mean: "Being paid to do soul-crushing work is better than not being paid" ? Or: "Doing soul-crushing work is better than having nothing to do" ? The first is an issue of income and the distribution of product (in the GDP sense of product). There is no axiomatic rule that says "you have to have a job to get paid", it's just how our current economy operates. If I owned a farm that produced a variety of food in excess of the needs of my whole family, but was totally operated by self-maintaining robots, would I need to have a job? The robots would produce all the food I need, and I could sell the excess in order to obtain other goods. I guess I could say my job was "farmer" or "grocery salesman" or "robot supervisor", but I wouldn't actually being doing work. If I am a truck driver, and I own my own truck and I make an income by transporting goods, and then I convert my truck to be self-driving so that I no longer need to be the driver, then (if we temporarily ignore external price pressures) I still make the same income as I used to. But I'm just reaping the benefits of my self driving truck, I don't actually "work" anymore (or at least to nowhere near the extent I used to). But if I am a truck driver, and someone else owns the truck and I make an income by being contracted to transport goods, and then they convert my truck to be self-driving so that I no longer need to be the driver, then I no longer make any income, and I'm screwed. The owner of the truck reaps incredible benefits, and I don't actually "work" anymore, but I also don't have an income. That's how things work in our society, but it doesn't have to be that way. There's no universal moral law that says that the first ex-truck-driver should continue to be paid for doing nothing much, but the second ex-truck-driver needs to get off his butt and go find a new soul-crushing job so that he can earn an income. As our economies change to produce more output with fewer workers, there becomes less useful work for the citizens to do, even though GDP is increasing. That ought to be a good thing (economically) - more "stuff we want", less effort to produce it. But it won't actually being a good thing for the general population unless we move to a different model for the distribution of income, so that there's a way for the populace to share in the increased productivity even though their manual labour is no longer needed. That where ideas like "Universal Basic Income" (UBI) come in.
  - lmm 10y ago
    > Or: "Doing soul-crushing work is better than having nothing to do" ? Are we sure this isn't true? Are people who don't have to work (e.g. those on permanent disability in the US) more or less happy than comparable people in dead-end soulless jobs?
    - timv 10y ago
      > Are we sure this isn't true? I don't know of any studies, but I suspect there would be some. In addition to the question of "how do we share income in a less-work world?", there is the question "how do we ensure that the are opportunities for everyone to contribute something meaningful to society?" Ideally those questions would connect - we would use our increased product(ivity) to fund a wider range of human endeavours that might not have been considered "economically productive" in previous generations. I don't know what that looks like, but I would hope it means more art and science, rather than more soul crushing, meaningless busy-work.
      - ethbro 10y ago
        Or even, how many researchers are working at McDonald's because their families' circumstances didn't afford them other opportunities, including ability to further their education? Maybe not many, but I feel pretty confident that number is greater than 0.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      While it may be informative, one of the differences between UBI and simply expanding current welfare programs is cultural. Right now, being out of a job is considered shameful, and it's often isolating (since "everyone" else is working while you're not). Even in my holiday-friendlier (compared to the US) EU country, the fact that an unemployed person takes a few days from searching for work to go to the beach is met with scorn. One of the hopes of UBI is that when everyone receives a salary just from being alive, and working earns you extra on top of that, whether one works become more of a choice (like living frugally) instead of a failure, and loneliness is reduced when unemployment isn't an evil to combat, and more people choose to do something else.
tuna-piano 10y ago
I know many college graduates in their mid/late twenties doing various "knowledge" jobs. Many of them consider their jobs soul crushing. Most people don't like their work. Most people don't like waking up on someone else's schedule and do work that their told to do. That's why businesses pay them, after all.
- sgift 10y ago
  And I always thought businesses pay you because you do something which they value, and that this is sometimes soul crushing is just a coincidence.
  - michaelt 10y ago
    Well, "Why would a company pay people to do this?" is a different question to "Why would a worker want pay to do this, rather than doing it for free?"
  - penguinduck 10y ago
    The more a person wants to do a job, the less compensation they will demand because the emotional satisfaction they get substitutes for a part (or sometimes all) of the compensation. When there are a lot of people who have a strong preference for doing a job in a particular industry, they collectively drive down the price of their own labor into the ground. Companies will only pay what they have to. Some examples of industries where tons of people work for shit money (less than a person of their abilities could earn in other industries) or even sometimes for free because of an emotional attachment to that industry are showbusiness, art and academia. Then you have the opposite examples, like working on an oil platform - most of those people would earn less money if they had picked a different industry, because they have to be paid more to agree to live on an oil platform and do a shitty and dangerous job.
sbov 10y ago
No, all you need are cheap robots to get past that local maxima. The point of UBI is to ensure people don't become destitute when we reach that point.
- ethbro 10y ago
  Robotic automation of any sort doesn't occur in a vacuum. If 50% of the jobs in a field are automated, in the near term you still have 100% of the former labor looking for that job, pushing salaries down towards their minimum, thereby reducing the cost effectiveness of further automation.
  - apendleton 10y ago
    Though of course (without passing a value judgment on such policies) minimum wages set an artificial lower bound on the cost of human labor here, and this kind of low-skill work is inexpensive enough that hitting that bound is likely (vs., say, automating legal work), especially as minimum wages rise. For some industries getting to the point that near-100% automation is cheaper than $15/hour for humans is totally plausible to me.
    - ethbro 10y ago
      Exactly. The differences between minimum wage and UBI is fascinating, but I didn't want to bring it up above. To me, minimum wage says "if you work, then you should at least able to support yourself on your income$." UBI+ says "if you work, you must find greater fulfillment than mere sustenance in your work." Personally, I can't see minimum wage applying to anyone receiving UBI. Although it might make sense to have a "less than minimum wage" tax that helps fund the UBI directly. $ Abstracting away actual amounts and whether or not they're enough + Market adjustments aside
      - sbov 10y ago
        At the same time, an UBI will make it so people still don't care to perform certain below-current-minimum-wage jobs. E.g. if I were on UBI, and I effectively earned $15/hour through it, I still wouldn't bother looking at jobs unless they paid, say, $5/hour or more.

noonespecial 10y ago

That people "need" awful picking jobs they hate doing but can be done better by robots is basically the existential problem humanity needs to solve this century or we are very likely to get Filtered, Robin Hanson style.

franK_ 10y ago
It's only existential in sci-fi books. Textiles were one of the first industries to be automated with the punched cards\power loom 150 years ago. We still have millions of human weavers all around the world. The problem with automation is you cant ask the robot why X, Y or Z is going wrong and how to fix it. A master weaver on the other hand will do it over a 15 minute conversation.
- sgift 10y ago
  > The problem with automation is you cant ask the robot why X, Y or Z is going wrong and how to fix it. A master weaver on the other hand will do it over a 15 minute conversation. That's a very romantic view of weaving which hides the real reason there are still many weavers, mostly in low-cost countries: They are cheaper than machines. There is no guarantee that this will still be true in face of increasing computing capabilities and machines which learn better than before.
- antisthenes 10y ago
  > We still have millions of human weavers all around the world. Yes, mostly in Asia, living in hellish conditions, often struggling to get enough food. I'm not sure what point you were trying to make with that comment.
robotresearcher 10y ago
The only reason those jobs exist right now is that humans are still much better than robots. Amazon is working on pick/pack robots in the hope of changing that.