Re: [Vo]:More on automation and Martin Ford

[Axil Axil]

China will lead the way. China has 1.5 billion people to keep happy with no
jobs to offer. It is true that all coastal cities worldwide within 100
miles of the coastline will be underwater and in need of relocation inland,
That should produce a number of jobs.

On Sat, Nov 26, 2016 at 11:02 PM, Jed Rothwell 
wrote:

> Daniel Rocha  wrote:
>
> Why do you think taxation won't be very heavy?
>>
>
> Because it will not cost much more than today's welfare systems, as I said.
>
>
>
>> Money won't appear out of nowhere, minimum wage will only accelerate
>> collapse.
>>
>
> Money always appears out of nowhere when the economy improves. This will
> improve the economy. The minimum wage is supposed to accelerate the
> process. We want a transition to robots doing all the work. A higher
> minimum wage will help produce that.
>
>
>
>> And there is still no answer about the debts.
>>
>
> We just need to raise taxes back to where they were under Reagan or
> Clinton. The deficit and the debts will gradually go away. There is no
> crisis.
>
>
>
>> In any case, there will be a finance disaster way worse than that of 1929.
>>
>
> There might be, if it is done wrong. If it is done right it might work as
> well as the period from 1945 to 1980, which was the most prosperous in U.S.
> history, with the highest taxes. The two can go together if it is done
> right.
>
> - Jed
>
>

Re: [Vo]:More on automation and Martin Ford

[Daniel Rocha]

How will economy improve if people are simply not buying? And it will be
much more costly. I am thinking about 90% of unemployment.

Re: [Vo]:More on automation and Martin Ford

[Jed Rothwell]

Daniel Rocha  wrote:

Why do you think taxation won't be very heavy?
>

Because it will not cost much more than today's welfare systems, as I said.



> Money won't appear out of nowhere, minimum wage will only accelerate
> collapse.
>

Money always appears out of nowhere when the economy improves. This will
improve the economy. The minimum wage is supposed to accelerate the
process. We want a transition to robots doing all the work. A higher
minimum wage will help produce that.



> And there is still no answer about the debts.
>

We just need to raise taxes back to where they were under Reagan or
Clinton. The deficit and the debts will gradually go away. There is no
crisis.



> In any case, there will be a finance disaster way worse than that of 1929.
>

There might be, if it is done wrong. If it is done right it might work as
well as the period from 1945 to 1980, which was the most prosperous in U.S.
history, with the highest taxes. The two can go together if it is done
right.

- Jed

Re: [Vo]:More on automation and Martin Ford

[Daniel Rocha]

Why do you think taxation won't be very heavy? Money won't appear out of
nowhere, minimum wage will only accelerate collapse. And there is still no
answer about the debts. In any case, there will be a finance disaster way
worse than that of 1929.

Re: [Vo]:More on automation and Martin Ford

[Jed Rothwell]

Daniel Rocha  wrote:

So, during the transition, when robots are too good, but not that good,
> people will be unemployed (or very, very low pay job), right?
>

Perhaps, but not necessarily. Social policy such as the minimum wage can
ameliorate such problems, at the cost of economic efficiency.



> So, there is the UBI to fix that. Right. So, there will a very heavy
> taxation on those who make robots and other productive industry and that
> will be shared by the population.
>

I do not think the taxation would be very heavy. In the initial phase the
basic income would be barely enough to survive on. Poor people could
survive on it only by pooling resources, Murray suggests. The overall cost
would not be much greater than present-day welfare systems. These systems
are inefficient and wasteful. Murray emphasizes that. Social Security
already covers a large fraction of the population. It would be replaced by
this system, at no increase in cost. (You hand out the same money to people
over 65 and call it "basic income.")

The income will be so low, few people will be willing to live on it alone.
Most people will still want to work, but perhaps for shorter hours. That is
what we need during the transition.

Step by step, as robots gradually eliminate most jobs, the basic income
would be raised, but it would still not be much of a burden on the wealthy
people and corporations, because they will be making so much more income
from their ownership of robot intellectual property. Besides, if they do
not go along with this, their income will drop to zero because no one will
be able to purchase their goods and services.

In the final phase, nearly all work is gone. Robot and computer
intellectual property patents end. Most of the technology goes into the
public domain. The cost of robots falls, and with robots plus cold fusion
the cost of goods, services, food and other necessities of life gradually
falls so much that we give everyone these things for free, the way we now
give away public education, library cards and surfaced roads. No one will
mind the cost, because it will be so low. A few thousand dollars a year in
today's dollars.

- Jed

Re: [Vo]:More on automation and Martin Ford

[Daniel Rocha]

So, during the transition, when robots are too good, but not that good,
people will be unemployed (or very, very low pay job), right? So, there is
the UBI to fix that. Right. So, there will a very heavy taxation on those
who make robots and other productive industry and that will be shared by
the population. The taxation will be greater and greater, as robots become
more and more efficient. This will make companies bankrupt, which will lead
to more unemployment and social arrest or, if there is no enough taxation,
people won't be able to find a job (or something that can pay them well
enough to make ends meet) anyway. So, there are manifold paths to societal
collapse.

The other question is that how debt, which grows more and more nowadays,
will be payed. This is a key issue and it seems another way that will lead
to a societal collapse, since there won't be enough money to pay that.

Re: [Vo]:More on automation and Martin Ford

[Jed Rothwell]

Here is another concept central to this discussion --

There are no permanent solutions in technology, economics or social policy.

Take a Watson class supercomputer. Such a thing would be impossible with
19th century Babbage computer technology. In 1970 it would have been
extraordinarily expensive, wasteful and impractical. It might have taken
money and electricity on the scale of the Manhattan Project. That would an
unjustified use of resources. Now, of course, it can be made at a modest
cost. A few generations from now, everyone will have a Watson class
computer in their cell phone.

Take a social policy such as universal national health care. This was not
necessary in the 19th century, because health care cost practically
nothing. Most of the time, when a person got seriously ill, the doctors
could do nothing. You lived or died by the whim of nature. As medicine
improved, the cost began to increase. Still, in 1963, President Kennedy's
child was born and died a few days later from infant respiratory distress
syndrome (IRDS). The hospital bill was small, because there was nothing the
doctors could do to save the child -- even the child of the President.
Nowadays, a child in that condition can be saved, but it costs tens of
thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Medical costs have gone out
of control partly *because the technology works so well*. By the late 20th
century, it became possible to cure a wide range of diseases and to prolong
old age by years or decades, but the financial cost was going through the
roof.

So right now, in this era of history, we need to spend a lot of money on
healthcare, and it often bankrupts families. It threatens to bankrupt the
whole economy. So we need social policies do deal with it. But it does not
follow that we will need these policies a hundred years from now. We can
predict that the cost will stabilize. Medical technology will eventually
stop improving by leaps and bounds. Instruments now covered by patents will
go into the public domain. Manufacturing techniques will improve, and costs
will fall. Things like kidney dialysis machines are much cheaper than they
used to be. Many nursing tasks will be done by robots. I predict that many
forms of surgery will eventually be done by robots. More diseases may be
diagnosed or even treated at home. Self-testing at home has already made
progress, and it may become far more sophisticated. We already have things
like blood pressure, blood glucose test kits and pregnancy tests. Instant
AIDS tests are being developed. Much more will follow.

I predict that decades from now the cost of healthcare will stabilize and
even decline as a percent of the GDP. Perhaps our social policies can then
be adjusted. We need policies that fit this era, these conditions, and the
medical technology we have now. Not what we had in 19th century, and not
what we will have in the 22nd century. There are no permanent solutions,
and there is no permanent moral obligation or moral imperative. People
nowadays say "healthcare is a right." I agree. It should be considered a
human right now, in our time, in our circumstances. It would be absurd to
say that in 1870 because healthcare as we know it did not exist. It will
probably be absurd to say that in the 22nd century because healthcare will
be more or less free, except in rare cases with extreme diseases. People in
first world countries not go around nowadays saying "safe drinking water is
a right" because everyone agrees, and because safe drinking water cost
society practically nothing. Except for a few places such as Flint, MI,
everyone takes safe drinking water for granted, and no one worries about
the cost. Healthcare will be the same in the 22nd century. I hope that a
basic income will be the same this century.

- Jed

Re: [Vo]:More on automation and Martin Ford

[Jed Rothwell]

H LV  wrote:


> The idea of a basic income is much older.
> ​Here is a history of the idea of basic income and how it has evolved
> alongside the emergence of the welfare state.​
> http://basicincome.org/basic-income/history/​
>
>

The idea is old, but the modern version based on robotic labor replacing
human labor is fairly recent. It has been mentioned from time to time in
the last 100 years, but it began to attract more attention and more
supporters in the early years of the 21st century, as it became clear that
progress in computer and robotics was accelerating. This acceleration came
as a surprise to many people (including me, I should confess) because
artificial intelligence seemed stuck in a rut for several decades. I
thought that self-driving automobiles would take 20 more years to develop.

Arthur C. Clarke, who was one of the best futurists who ever lived,
described a robot-based economy in which people did not need to work many
times, notably in his novel "Childhood's End" (1953) and "Profiles of the
Future" (1963). That's where I got the idea. I discussed it with him
several times, so I know somewhat more about his views on this than most
people do. (Not to suggest his views were necessarily right, or more
advanced than, say, Martin Ford's. Ford knows more about computer
technology than Clarke did.)

- Jed

Re: [Vo]:More on automation and Martin Ford

[Jed Rothwell]

The U. Bath document references a seminal paper in this field by a
libertarian:

IN OUR HANDS A Plan to Replace the Welfare State
Charles Murray
THE AEI PRESS
Publisher for the American Enterprise Institute WASHINGTON, D.C.

http://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/-in-our-hands_105549266790.pdf

This again demonstrates that it makes no sense to call this a socialist or
communist idea. From the point of view of right-wing supporters and
libertarians it is opposite. I think that applying 19th century ideological
categories to 21st century ideas does not work. This is neither communist
nor capitalist. As I said, those systems are about allocating human labor,
and directing human activities. The basic income is about robot labor.
Robots don't have feelings. They do not resent being exploited by us, or
working 24 hours a day without being paid. Essentially, what is emerging is
a society based on slave labor. Hundreds of times more slave labor than any
previous society could of dreamed of. All of us will be able to live
without working, the way slave owners have always done when they chose to.
Needless to say, unlike any previous system of slavery, this one will not
be depraved. It will not be wicked, or inhuman.

This is something new, made possible by new technology. It is possible to
begin this now. Later it will become imperative if we are going to have a
functioning economy in which people can eat.

If cold fusion can be made to work, it will accelerate this trend more than
any other technology except robotics.

- Jed

Re: [Vo]:More on automation and Martin Ford

[H LV]

On Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 11:27 AM, Jed Rothwell 
wrote:

> H LV  wrote:
>
> ​Universal basic income isn't a neo-communist proposal.
>>
>
> It was first proposed by conservative economists Friederich Hayek and
> Milton Friedman. There is a lot of conservative support for it. See:
>
> http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/08/why-aren
> t-reformicons-pushing-a-guaranteed-basic-income/375600/
>
>>
>>

The idea of a basic income is much older.
​Here is a history of the idea of basic income and how it has evolved
alongside the emergence of the welfare state.​
http://basicincome.org/basic-income/history/​


​Harry​

Re: [Vo]:More on automation and Martin Ford

[H LV]

​
O​
n Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 10:22 AM, Daniel Rocha  wrote:

> Basic Income is a neo liberal proposal. It would allow, at a first moment,
> to politically privatize welfare and healthcare services, in places where
> otherwise there would exist universal care, to be in the hands of private
> institutions. This institutions could set expenses high enough and, thus,
> allocating from the basic income while providing low quality services. So,
> it's retrograde instead of a progressive thing.
>
>
​
Basic income doesn't have to be regressive.
​Yes
some "neo-liberals" would like to use it to privatize healthcare and
​to ​
completely dismantle the welfare state but the basic income movement has
advocat
​es from across the political spectrum. This article makes it clear that
the basic income movement is not driven by a single socio-economic vision
​.
​
​
Exposing a fragile coalition: The state of the basic income debate
http://blogs.bath.ac.uk/iprblog
/2016/10/21/exposing-a-fragile-coalition-the-state-of-the-basic-income-debate/

<<
​
Yet despite (or perhaps because of) intensified interest in basic income,
the debate has become more polarised than ever. It is an elegant balance of
justice and liberty; it is the worst of all possible worlds. It is the
saviour of the welfare state; it will destroy it. It can be implemented
tomorrow; it is a vague and distant utopia.
​>>​



Harry​

[Vo]:OT: TOWARDS UNCONDITIONAL BASIC INCOME, a Randomized Controlled Trial to Come

[H LV]

KENYA: FROM UNCONDITIONAL CASH TRANSFERS TOWARDS UNCONDITIONAL BASIC
INCOME, a Randomized Controlled Trial to Come

In a recent IMPAKTER interview, as part of a series exploring the UN
Sustainable Development Goals, Ian Bassin (Chief Operating Officer,
Domestic, of GiveDirectly), explains how his organization is moving from
unconditional cash transfers (UCTs) towards unconditional basic income
(UBI) in Kenya.

GiveDirectly traditionally provides UCTs to the extremely poor, operating
in Kenya and Uganda.

“We started our program in Kenya because they had a very robust mobile
money payment system there, and that’s the means by which we transfer cash
to poor households”, Bassin says.

The primary goal of GiveDirectly is to help demonstrate the effectiveness
and efficiency of cash transfers. The research done so far shows that
giving money to poor people works.

“Poverty in its simplest terms is a lack of money and resources. It is not
a lack of capacity or ability”, Bassin notes. “If we’re not doing more with
our dollar than the poor could do for themselves, we should probably just
be giving them the dollar.”

Recipients of UCTs don’t spend the cash transfer on vice consumption, like
alcohol or tobacco, nor does the transfer discourage people from working,
Bassin explains. He refers to a recent World Bank Study that has shown UCTs
are in fact more likely to reduce than to increase the consumption of vice
goods.

​continues...​
http://basicincome.org/news/2016/11/kenya-unconditional-cash-transfers-towards-unconditional-basic-income-randomized-controlled-trial-come/

Re: [Vo]:More on automation and Martin Ford

[Alain Sepeda]

Farmers will be able to take vacation, instead of having no life in France
and ending to ask for a legal association (kind of cross-protection in case
of death Civil wedding ) between older brother/sister who cannot find a
mate and live together (it was asked during study of gay civil wedding bill
and refused .

Parents will pass less time running in the big mall, and rather make
homework with their kids and play in the park.

lost time is lost time, and if some job/annoyance was someway good, it can
be replaced by what is good without the pain.
If you want contact, go out, just to make contact, not just to fill your
fridge.
In fact I have seen that...
mother below 50s style who have no life between cooking, washing,
hoovering, running to the shops, moving the kids, discovered drivein,
surgelated and microwave, (recently) hoover bots, and bikes or busses, and
they do new things...
Some new careers, hobbyworks, social life, activism, politics, Saturday
night fever ...

however if you cannot make anything, or if you imagine you cannot make
anything, else your old work, then giving you more time for something else
is a murder...
in a way this is what happen to part of the retired workers. part of them
die quickly of boredom consequence...
today however retired workers are pillars for charities, clubs, local
associations, and helps working parents by babysitting... they are just not
paid, but they often work hard.


2016-11-26 21:54 GMT+01:00 Axil Axil :

> Amazon can develope of product delivery system that will allow the
> customer to receive all his consumables via robot, This would eliminate all
> supermarket and brick and mortar stores from the product distribution chain
> and also remove the delivery driver from the delivery process, People will
> not need to leave their homes to live. Shopping will be a computer based
> process from selection to delivery.
>
> A dairy farm can now be completely automated including milking the cows.
>
> On Sat, Nov 26, 2016 at 3:38 PM, Jed Rothwell 
> wrote:
>
>> Here is how Amazon.com robots work. The machines themselves are not
>> particularly sophisticated.
>>
>> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtBa9yVZBJM
>>
>>
>

Re: [Vo]:More on automation and Martin Ford

[Axil Axil]

Amazon can develope of product delivery system that will allow the customer
to receive all his consumables via robot, This would eliminate all
supermarket and brick and mortar stores from the product distribution chain
and also remove the delivery driver from the delivery process, People will
not need to leave their homes to live. Shopping will be a computer based
process from selection to delivery.

A dairy farm can now be completely automated including milking the cows.

On Sat, Nov 26, 2016 at 3:38 PM, Jed Rothwell  wrote:

> Here is how Amazon.com robots work. The machines themselves are not
> particularly sophisticated.
>
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtBa9yVZBJM
>
>

Re: [Vo]:More on automation and Martin Ford

[Jed Rothwell]

Here is how Amazon.com robots work. The machines themselves are not
particularly sophisticated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UtBa9yVZBJM