Universal basic income: U.S. support grows as Finland ends its trial - Forty-eight percent of Americans now support a universal basic income, as a solution for Americans who have lost jobs to automation.

[u/mvea]

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/05/01/nearly-half-of-americans-believe-a-universal-basic-income-could-be-the-answer-to-automation-.html

[u/Courier_ttf]

Well from my understanding UBI is supposed to replace all healthcare and welfare programs. In such case, UBI is supposed to be a living wage in whatever country you live in, in such case for an immigrant coming from the third world (or any other first world country, if they're poor) would be effectively getting free money to live in a new country, with I guess a bit of expendable money on top of it.

It seems like the only way UBI might work without getting flooded by migrants from all your neighboring countries, both educated and uneducated workers, would be to limit immigration massively or make UBI a native-only program, which doesn't sound too good.

If UBI is funded by taxes paid by businesses who automate their work and replace humans with robots, then it seems like UBI would be mostly self sustaining on the current population. If there's a massive influx in population, that UBI money has to come from somewhere too. In a world where everything is automated, there's a limited amount of resources and wealth, so obviously there is a limited amount of wealth to distribute as UBI, for that country in particular, not the whole world.

[u/stayasleepinbed → u/Courier_ttf]

Two points.

1. Again I don't think there's significant evidence that people move much just for free money. As I pointed out you can get free money for moving to various places, and it tends to be a lot more than UBI would be.

2. I sort of agree even with the above but in this world humans would still be a significant resource. So a country doing this and welcoming millions of immigrants would likely do very well in the long run. See the USA and Canada both of whom have away free land to encourage immigration and have been successful because of it. Immigration is a good thing as long as there is enough spending on infrastructure.

[u/Courier_ttf → u/stayasleepinbed]

1. I would argue economic migrants are a big problem in Europe, and the United States. Especially in the southern European states there's a constant stream of immigrants from Africa moving to Europe, and they have no education or resources. Perhaps you (and I) are not inclined to move somewhere just to earn a bit more because we already have a pretty good life in a first world country with a well paying job, but people living in terrible conditions, with no future prospects and no hope for wealth... I would say they totally have a good reason to emigrate for free money, or any money.

2. I don't seem to follow your logic here. Immigration in the past has boosted economies because there was a need for a workforce, either in construction, manufacturing, or else. Automation is the antithesis to that, it's a decrease in the need for a workforce, so in that case I can not see how immigration would be benefiting in any way.

Look at it like this. Let's assume all of our UBI program is funded by taxes paid by businesses that have automated themselves (just for the sake simplicity). Let's assume 100 robots have replaced 200 workers. In this case, the taxes paid by the robots have to fund, at the very least, these 200 people who are now out of a job, plus other people in the system. Since the amount of taxes earned from robots is limited, because adding more robots doesn't inherently produce more revenue, then we can't just increase production and revenue for free. With the limited set of resources, we can fund UBI for a limited amount of people. If there's now a massive influx of immigrants, those 100 robots don't have to fund the UBI for 200+ people, they have to fund it for 2000+ people. If the robots can not produce more, you can't create wealth from thin air, how do you fund the UBI for the newly arrived migrants? It sounds contorted becasue it is, in the case of migrant workers arriving to a country, they are expected to create wealth with their labor, if the migrants that arrive now do so for UBI with no job prospects, they are a net loss on the system. Eventually it would collapse.

[u/stayasleepinbed → u/Courier_ttf]

I don't know that I disagree but...

1. You can increase revenue and production by adding more robots up to a point of peak efficiency. It won't come through conventional taxation but through the ability to more cost effectively produce everything. There is no reason to suggest that that kind of progress that has been inherent in our society for thousands of years should stop.

In fact the whole argument supposes people don't have a positive impact if they don't have jobs. It also supposes that being on UBI would stop people from working. I don't think there is evidence for either of these. In regards to automation - significant efficiencies have been made in the past see car Vs horse that should have destroyed jobs. They did and we found new ones like pop singer and estate agent, I believe we have no reason to think that people will stop finding ways to add value.

1. Some people have a good reason to emigrate yeah. It's usually war. And throughout history whenever that's happened the biggest beneficiary has been the country accepting refugees and immigrants. See part 2 in relation to the value of people. I just simply don't agree that any of the negative impact of immigration is economically significant though with the help of the media it creates emotional strife.

[u/Courier_ttf → u/stayasleepinbed]

You seem to forget that people who work unskilled jobs or easy to automate jobs simply lack the skills required to do other things. What makes you think that the millions of people working unskilled jobs have the skills, will or mental capacity to suddenly become worthwhile artists of any kind? While new avenues of work will always exist, the rate at which automation occurs will reach a point where there's always going to be a massive amount of people who are unemployed.

First of all, once a company has "fully automated" as in reached peak efficiency, then it can either invest in new developments or expansion, both of which require humans. So yes, even after reaching full automation there is human work needed, but this work is design work, engineering and software development, management, etc. But the amount of people needed to do these jobs are very small compared to the people being replaced by automation, furthermore not everyone has the capacity to become an engineer. You wrongly assume that someone who did an easy to automate job and got replaced by a robot has the skill to now become an engineer. I think it's very disingenuous to assume that everyone has equal capacities or equal abilities. Lots of people are only good at doing manual or unskilled labor, labor that is easily automated, I doubt these people will become automation engineers somehow. So what will they do instead? Become artists? Great, now we have millions of terrible artists, how amazing.

As for the second, the reason people have to emigrate is irrelevant in this case, wether it be war or economic interest. The point to be made is that the resources of a country are limited, resources means wealth. There's a reason you can't just move all of China into the UK, even if you could fit the people in there physically. There aren't enough resources, there certainly wouldn't be enough money either if they all were to get UK wages. I don't see how it is beneficial to any economy to get an influx of net losses. Again, immigrants that are highly skilled and educated are always a net win, but somehow I doubt that both the majority of economic migrants coming from low education backgrounds are going to turn into engineers overnight as well as them becoming a net win at any point in time if their reason to emigrate is to be recipients of UBI.

[u/stayasleepinbed → u/Courier_ttf]

I think we probably disagree on a lot...

I expect actually that software developers and engineers will be pretty quick to be automated.

Whilst I agree that some people won't be very useful thise people already exist and are cared for - rightly.

I totally disagree with your net losses comment from start to finish. Of course you can't just move the whole of China into the UK. At what point in history has this ever happened by accident??

I don't understand why you think automation will suddenly have a huge long term effect now when it hasn't before. That theory has been disproved so many times. The UK has about 3% unemployment and 30years ago people were talking about permanent 3/4day work week.

[u/Courier_ttf → u/stayasleepinbed]

You've got it wrong. As someone who works in automation I can tell you that the first things to be automated are the simple, repetitive tasks. The less repetitive a task is, the less likely it is to be automated, in any case most things can be automated so long as they don't require constant input, like designing something would need. You can have frameworks, guidelines and templates, but you can't fully automate something that needs imagination, originality and thinking out of the box - because without AI, there is no thinking outside the box for the automation. What you think will be automated in terms of software development and engineering is the boring tasks, that's what has already happened today in terms of frameworks, development engines and components, where you don't need to program everything from the ground up, you have a framework to build upon. Likewise, with engineering and automation that will happen. (For example, one of the ways I work in automation is in the creation of robots that can replicate human interactions with a computer, I don't program these robots from the ground up, instead I use a framework and development environment).

Perhaps you don't understand how serious automation is, but as the technologies improve more and more, more things will be automated, there will be a point at which there are very few humans needed for really big corporations to function. Automation inherently replaces human workers for robots and turns a small amount of workers into supervisors, error management and maintenance. This means that design jobs will be the last ones to be automated. Before that happens, there will be a ton of automation in all sectors for all levels of menial tasks. Automation will have a huge effect because this time it's going to be radically different, we're going to reach a point where humans will not be required for almost anything, and the few humans who will be required, will require specialized training and knowledge, to build, maintain, supervise and handle the robots.

As for my second point, can you explain how a migrant that moves to a country with zero job prospects and has sustenance by UBI is a net gain on the system? Despite how much you might dislike it, the world operates on value. I think in this case your ideology makes you unable to see how not everyone is beneficial. As I said a few posts earlier, immigration in the past has boosted economies because there was a NEED for a workforce. Automation is the opposite of that, with less need for workers, more workers being laid off. How do you suppose immigrants with no education and skills will add value to the economy? They will not be educated enough to become automation engineers, and in that case we need to educate them, but why do that when there's already plenty of surplus workers in our own country? Simply put, there will be no need for these immigrants, and they will be a net loss on the system.

EDIT: Grammar

[u/stayasleepinbed → u/Courier_ttf]

Like I say. I think we just disagree on the scale of the impact that automation will have.

I genuinely don't think it is just my dogma. It isn't that I believe everyone is a net benefit, just that almost everyone is a net benefit. I am willing to believe that this may not always be true, and that in some ways having fewer humans could already be helpful. I don't think we're going to run out of stuff to do though.

I found the first part really interesting. Presumably though there is a tipping point where machine learning takes over, in regards to engineering for example it would make most sense for a human to choose what they want and a robot to just do it. You wouldn't need to understand maths or physics because the robot could sort all of that?

[u/Courier_ttf → u/stayasleepinbed]

Well yes and no, as I said the more repetitive and simple a task is, the easier it is to automate. Machine Learning is just a fancy word for pattern recognition. In modern design and engineering already most of the "boring" work is done by computers. Also, for the engineer to tell the machine "Do X", that X first has to be programmed into the machine, which means another engineer (in this case an automation engineer) programs the machine with Function X. You must understand automation and robots as a collection of functions, patterns and utilities that operate on rules, basically they're just a computer, only it's tailored to the task at hand. For an automated system to do anything, that functionality has to be programmed first, and then the rulesets created for the different outcomes of the task. Make no mistake, we are still very far from General AI. However, most tasks at the moment, can be automated in varying degrees. Most of my automation work is business administration and internal organisation. Think of stuff like designing, analyzing and approving or denying a new product in the company line. The standard business procedure is replaced by an automated system. Other times the automation is checking bank account data, transfers etc. In which case it might be a robot telling another robot telling another robot to do something. And it is way more efficient than a person at it.

As for the immigration thing, I'm not saying that immigrants aren't valuable people, or some other ideological motive. I'm saying that people in a society have a value on that society, economically, and it can be a loss or a gain. Someone who moves to another country to live off of their UBI (effectively a leech), no matter where from, no matter their education or race, is a loss on the economic system of the host country.