this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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When some people see news like this they try and reassure themselves that automation has always created new jobs. You don't see secretarial typists or horse carriage riders anymore, right?
The flaw in this argument is that the AI & robots will be able to do all the new jobs too, but they'll just cost a few pennies where humans were used to getting paid a dollar.
All the people who still think everything is hunky-dory with this and we've nothing to worry about remind me of videos of people on the beaches in 2004 watching the Indian Ocean tsunami coming in, and not realizing until the very last minute how serious things were about to get.
Caring about jobs is kind of silly. If there were no jobs there would be no customers. That's not how the market works. Someone is always going to try to sell something and they need people to support them.
That's true, but if robots are cheaper than humans, no company would employ humans for the sole purpose of being customers. That's not how companies work. Any company which does so will quickly lose to a competitor which doesn't.
The societal support (e.g. UBI) necessary for this upcoming transition will need to come from governments, not companies.
Thats just half true. You overlook cases like bureaucracy or neptonism, when people help others into companies.
It would be esay for the US gouverment to force companies to hire persons, even for silly activities like "machine observing". You just need to make a Act of Congress which requieres something that needs a human. Doesn't matter. The cooperations would make an effort to hire really humans, in order to prevent a lawsuid. The courts would just say, "okay, this is the federal law, any cooperation which makes a trade between the States needs to follow it". Some applies for the EU, China, Japan etc.
Is this less efficient than a AI based system? Sure. They will make some exaptions.
This just sounds like UBI with extra steps, and not very universal, as there won't be as many "machine observing" jobs as there were jobs which the machine replaced.
Why not free up the newly unemployable portion of the population to pursue their passions and enjoy life, rather than mandating the existence of silly jobs for the sake of jobs?
You can make more and more bureaucracy. Someone must traine the machine observer, someone supervise them etc. There are no limits for the imagination.
I think it would be a problem with inflation and so on.