What motivation do we have to compensate those people who lost their jobs to automation?
Would we actually need to anyway?
consider this:
lets say you set up a lawyer service that would review contracts, provide legal advice, etc. The average cost of electricity is 13 cents per kW hour. If the computation requires 500 kW of power, then that service would cost 6.5 cents, plus extra to maintain the equipment. lets round up to 25 cents. Imagine getting professional legal services for only 25 cents an hour! In this economy, every non-manual service would be like that.
Unless of course UBI is implemented and the course of action chosen is to tax services such as these. Then the price rises by at least the amount required to pay for said tax. We can also assume that the owners would provide themselves a fair margin of error, because of the ambiguity associated with receiving future business.
0
Enjoy being online again!
Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.Create your free account
1 comment
Feel free to reply to any comment by clicking the "Reply" button.Read Kurt Vonnegut's "Player Piano" about a future where most jobs are lost to automation.
The book was published in 1952.
It's 2019, and the unemployment rate is less than 4%.
People have been predicting this for 7 decades, but it still has not come to pass.
The people who do lose their jobs to automation should be given government subsidized job training so they can rejoin the workforce performing a job that has not been automated.
BD66
Level 8
Apr 1, 2019
0
What happens when there are no jobs that can't be automated? The difference is that there were still things that humans could do that machines could not. Sooner or latter, that will change. Then what?
BD66:
@Happy_Killbot People have been saying that since 1952, but we are still near full employment. We are still many many years away from the time machines and AI will replace the majority of humans in the workforce.
@BD66 If we are 30 years away from the scenario described above, I would consider that near future. Here is why: If a school student is graduating this year (class of 2019) and decides he wants to be a lawyer. He gets his bachelors degree (4 years) then goes to law school (3 years) now he gets a job at a law firm and must off his student loans. This takes him 10 - 20 years, depending on how well he manages his money (average for law students is 21 years [lendedu.com] ) He now has only a few short years to practice his profession before he is replaced by automation and possibly forced into early retirement. Keep in mind this model is unrealistic because it assumes that the technological advances to make this possible happen suddenly, when in reality such technologies would be developed in stages, meaning he might not be employable prior to paying off his debt, for example if a technology eliminated the need for paralegals.
Assuming you are a parent, would you recommend based on this information that your study to become lawyers?
Enjoy being online again!
Welcome to the community of good people who base their values on evidence and appreciate civil discourse - the social network you will enjoy.Create your free account
Share this post
Categories
Agnostic does not evaluate or guarantee the accuracy of any content. Read full disclaimer.