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0 pointsdaenz6y ago0 comments

>I think in the long term UBI is pretty much the only solution.

Or...the costs of goods adjust as demand shifts, and things previously not considered "a job" start being considered jobs. I don't know why people get this idea in their head that if suddenly everyone works less for the same amount, everything stays the same price. Producers still want consumers, so prices shift. In the future, you might get paid to judge how moving and emotional music sounds. Or how good food tastes. As long as there exist services that humans want and we can't yet automate, there will always be an economy.

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TeMPOraL6y ago· 2 in thread

> In the future, you might get paid to judge how moving and emotional music sounds. Or how good food tastes.

Those examples sound pretty tractable for statistics, +/- better measurement technology in the case of food. Emotion isn't magic, there are whole industries that already know how to design things to be "moving and emotional".

> As long as there exist services that humans want and we can't yet automate, there will always be an economy.

The issue isn't "an economy", but an economy where most population can find gainful employment during their entire working age. This is increasingly becoming less likely in the future, and we need to find a way to deal with that.

(Also, the prices are flexible, but if they shift too high or too low, producers start doing problematic things or give up on the product entirely. This is how you end up with farmers letting tons of perfectly good food to rot, while 10 minutes down the road there's a city full of starving people.)

daenzOP6y ago

>Those examples sound pretty tractable for statistics

You're missing my point: things that don't seem like jobs, no matter what they are, will be legitimate gainful jobs, as long as people want them done and they can't be automated or are too much effort to automate. Unless you are making the argument that in the near/medium future, nothing falls into that category. If that's the case, then we just disagree. I think the problem lies more with connecting people to those new jobs than them actually existing.

TeMPOraL6y ago

There's a lot of things people want done that can't be jobs. For instance, myself and quite a lot of other people want the surplus CO₂ out of the atmosphere. Yet this isn't a job, and probably won't be for a while, because we can't make money off it. I can't afford just paying for it, not the amounts required. I'd have to make money off it or off something else.

Outside of charity, no job exists without it making more money for the employer than it costs to pay for that job.

I'm making the argument that the pool of things that people want done and can monetize is much smaller, and I'm not convinced it'll grow fast enough to cover for automation-induced job loss.

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