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Fuzzers t1_j51ly94 wrote

My personal opinion: There will be blood.

As AI begins to replace jobs, unemployment will begin to rise assuming new jobs aren't created when old jobs are replaced. This will take many years to manifest, beginning with basic jobs like long haul transport and admin services, and compounding over years towards more complicated jobs like the trades.

Now the question becomes, where is the turning point where unemployment is so high that the government has to step in to prevent a societal collapse? 10%? 20%? 50%? Who knows, but violence always comes before government intervention.

There will be riots long before the conversation even begins about UBI, the government in general is never proactive, they are always reactive. This means they will wait till the country is on the verge of collapse before even beginning to consider talking to the corporations about UBI payments, and even then the process could take years to complete.

This argument all hinges on the idea that more jobs will be lost then created due to AI labor displacement, which to be completely honest is very difficult to forecast. If 3.2 million trucks lose their jobs in the states, where do they go? Is there a new industry or roles created due to the AI trucker displacement? Who knows.

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phriot t1_j52bwuy wrote

>As AI begins to replace jobs, unemployment will begin to rise assuming new jobs aren't created when old jobs are replaced.

In the past, mechanization and automation was pretty much contained to one role at a time, not even necessarily one job at a time. So, if you mechanized sewing, you could sell more clothes at a cheaper price point, driving demand for sales clerks, designers, managers, construction workers to build new stores, and so on.

The thing is that this wave of automation is coming for arbitrary jobs. There's nothing that eventually won't be able to be done better, or at least more cheaply, by some software, maybe with a robot attached. Soon (now?), if you can make a better shirt for a cheaper price, you can sell it on a website, have an AI write the copy, have a robot build your warehouse, have a self-driving truck bring the shirts to a shipping service, a smaller self-driving truck go to a neighborhood, and a drone drop the shirt off at the customer's doorstep. Where's the new job for humans? Influencer? How many of those can an economy support?

You also now lost the jobs for the truck stop workers, and maybe some additional gas station and fast food workers. The self-driving trucks and drones will need maintenance, but likely less than older ICE vehicles. Planning on having robot maintainers replace the lost jobs will only work until the robots can repair themselves. (More likely an automated repair depot caring for modular robots).

As you note, it will probably take some time to get to that future. But it will be decades, and not centuries. How many of us can become plumbers and electricians before those manual, non-routine jobs are lost, too?

>This will take many years to manifest, beginning with basic jobs like long haul transport and admin services, and compounding over years towards more complicated jobs like the trades.

Don't forget that a lot of "difficult" knowledge jobs will be automated, too, and probably well before the trades. It won't just be fast food workers, truck drivers, and personal assistants.

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PoliteThaiBeep t1_j52kvtx wrote

I think public opinion sort of bounces back and forth around issues trying to find "balance".

In the 70s there was a public push to reduce taxes, which overtime resulted in a massive reduction of effective taxes for the rich and since then inequality has been exploding.

A bit of breathing room happened in 90s which calmed the public I think. A lot of good things happened.

At some point hopefully not too late it'll again reach to the point where the public push towards higher taxes for the rich will make sense to part of republican constituents.

I actually think we're very close, we already had basically UBI payments across the whole country during pandemic and nobody bat an eye even though just a few years ago it seemed impossible.

There just needs to be some kind of public catalyst to implement effective taxes level of near 1970s levels and also start UBI at the same time. It doesn't even needs to be large or to be called "ubi". It could be a bunch of different things that would together act as a UBI, but we won't call it that.

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stievstigma t1_j5c4bvf wrote

You mean like a “Freedom Dividend”?

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PoliteThaiBeep t1_j5c8jqm wrote

I think Andrew Yang called it that right?

But his solution was to introduce VAT taxes and use that to finance UBI to avoid "redistribution" stigma.

I think politically it probably makes sense, but personally I think taxing rich passive income is more beneficial for the economy if implemented.

Right now poor people's major income source is work, investment income is a tiny portion for them. As you go up the bracket investment income tends to be more and more important and for billionaires I think it's over 70% income is in investment. I don't remember exact numbers but I remember the trend.

Despite this investment income taxes are capped at 20%. (For a stock owned for over a year) This creates a natural runaway wealth scenario where more money just makes money with limited incentives to actually create stuff.

I'd say UBI should be financed from the top 1% investment income taxes, make them higher like 30-50% for people with over 10 mil in investment, don't touch regular income taxes, don't introduce VAT.

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stievstigma t1_j5f2yt5 wrote

Yeah, it was Yang. I agree with most of what you said but I was under the impression that the VAT tax he was proposing was to be leveraged against big tech, as in, Amazon would be taxed on every transaction, Google would be taxed on every search, etc. Of course, it’s easy to see how those costs could trickle down though so yeah, taxing passive income makes more sense.

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PoliteThaiBeep t1_j52n424 wrote

Also I think the most important part of taxing rich is progressive taxing passive income from the stock market. Maybe we don't even need to increase income taxes. Maybe we just need to modify passive income taxes.

It does two things really well:

  1. Incentives rich to create things instead of just sitting on the money
  2. Very predictable flow of money to UBI
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Rakshear t1_j52u2xb wrote

Actually i suspect in terms of ai driven cars laws will be enacted requiring humans to always be present incase of emergencies or outages. This includes big rigs of course, which will mean people still need to be employed, though the pay probably won’t be as good, it will be much easier.

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TheSecretAgenda t1_j535qd2 wrote

Trucks will monitored remotely from a central location. A human driver will drive the truck by satellite like a remote-control race car.

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InvisibleWrestler t1_j52zfv2 wrote

Companies that have already invested in big machines or equipment that need humans to operate will move to full automation very slowly. If a company just bought many human driven trucks it'll take them long time to switch to fully automated trucks or to upgrade already purchased ones. If a manufacturing plant has been designed with human workers in mind it'll take time and more investment to get full automation. And we're still long way from affordable humanoid robots.

On the other hand if some simple AI cloud subscription could automate the work of an office worker, call center worker, accountant or programmer, that would happen a lot faster.

IMHO office jobs will start getting automated on a large scale in a few years. And a lot earlier than truck or bus drivers.

Aspirational jobs that require a degree and student debt are more at a risk than manual labour.

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Bierculles t1_j552nwl wrote

you face another problem with job displacement, even if you move all the people into new jobs, by the time you have reeducated them, AI probably can do that job too.

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