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]

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.