Can’t read the article due to bandwidth. If the era of jobs is over, what’s going to support the masses of people who consume? Without those people, there’s no profit from making stuff. Star Trek looks great, but there’s a whole lot of time, politics and physics that has to occur to get there.
its not though... there is literally an infinite amount of work. If humans become 10,000x more efficient, then we still have infinite amount of work to do.
Not necessarily true. There are non-human bottlenecks to productivity, like energy, land area, available raw materials, etc. You're assuming humans can find ways to meaningfully contribute that do not bump up against any of those constraints. R&D is probably the only area not bottlenecked by one of the above out of the gate, and most humans are ill suited for that line of work.
> most humans are ill suited for that line of work.
Based on what? Certainly there are humans with crippling disabilities that remove them from pretty much any kind of work, but of the "normally functioning" population?
Most lack the necessary attention directed towards R&D as they're too busy living out other lives in other jobs. If that's what you mean, that is a fair point. But if those jobs went away as suggested earlier, they'd have nothing else to do but turn their attention towards R&D. That current world model wouldn't apply anymore.
Several decades of academic achievement data, psychology studies, etc. I get the argument that "the whole world would be different, so present data isn't applicable", but, if that's your argument, then it's totally unfalsifiable.
> Several decades of academic achievement data, psychology studies, etc.
Right. That much was obvious. But what does that mean in more detail? If you pick a random, normally capable, person off the street and give them everything they need to become successful in R&D, what ends up happening?
> If you pick a random, normally capable, person off the street and give them everything they need to become successful in R&D, what ends up happening?
Don't we run that experiment on every moderately wealthy child on the planet? I can tell you that the hit rate there is definitely not 100%.
I don't know. You're the one who has studied the data, not me. What's the answer?
If you are asking about what I've seen anecdotally, which is all you can expect of me given that I am not the one of us who is the subject matter expert between us, all those who were moderately wealthy children that I know have grown up into having success with R&D in at least some limited capacity. They haven't all dedicated their lives to R&D, but they've had no trouble being able to invent things when the situation necessitated it.
If they had more time to dedicate their life to it, I see no reason for why that would stop. But, again, you're the expert among us here. I don't know much about it — that is why I'm asking you.
Aside, R&D fundamentally isn't guaranteed to deliver fruit, so elaborate for us on how the research you spoke of differentiates between someone who is well suited to R&D work but never strikes gold due to the nature of the beast, and someone who cannot strike gold because they are straight up incapable as a person. That might help us communicate about this more effectively.
> which is all you can expect of me given that I am not the one of us
Not sure why the snark is necessary. Its pretty easy to look up academic achievement stratified by socioeconomic status. I'm not an expert, but the line for rich kids doesn't go to 100%.
> If they had more time to dedicate their life to it, I see no reason for why that would stop.
Because not everyone is a bottomless pit of ambition. Most people, given the option, engage in leisure in their free time.
> Aside, R&D fundamentally isn't guaranteed to deliver fruit, so elaborate for us on how the research you spoke of differentiates between someone who is well suited to R&D work but never strikes gold due to the nature of the beast, and someone who cannot strike gold because they are straight up incapable as a person. That might help us communicate about this more effectively.
I'm speaking in generalities. Research is generally a race, and the smartest and hardest working generally win the race. Even if everyone's IQ and ambition shot up, there would still be a smarter and harder working subset of people.
After that last paragraph, it isn't clear to me that you disagree with my core premise of "not everyone should do research".
Not sure why you think a computer screen is giving you snark, but you do you.
> I'm not an expert
You read through all of that data and research, as told earlier, and haven't become an expert...? Yeah right. No need to be so modest with me. Be proud of your achievements!
> Its pretty easy to look up academic achievement stratified by socioeconomic status.
It may be, but no need to waste time sauntering off on another, rather uninteresting, subject. We're talking about R&D, not academic achievement. Stay focused, by friend.
> Most people, given the option, engage in leisure in their free time.
R&D is the leisure activity of many people. We'll leave your data sources to quantify exactly what that means, but it is clearly large enough to be a recognizable set of the population.
> Research is generally a race
It can be where you are trying to be first to build a moat around something that scales massively. But not all R&D scales, or even wants to scale. Despite your unquantified "generally" claim, it remains unclear if most R&D is even trying to scale. There are a lot of hobbyists out there carrying out R&D with no plans for it beyond doing something for themselves.
> there would still be a smarter and harder working subset of people.
There is seemingly no end to how much R&D is possible. I guess at some point there is a pinnacle of human achievement, but it seems highly unlikely that we'll reach that point in the next thousand years. Humans are pretty shortsighted — the people from the year 1200 would have never imagined digital computers being a thing — but when the time comes we always find something new to immerse our thoughts in.
> You read through all of that data and research, as told earlier, and haven't become an expert...? Yeah right. No need to be so modest with me. Be proud of your achievements!
Okay. You seem upset, so I'll disengage. Have a great day!
As valuable as that diversion no doubt was for you, we still haven't established from your data sources how many people are involved in R&D in a hobby/pleasure/necessity capacity and how that compares to those who have chosen to dedicate their lives towards it.
If it is not in the data, you can say so, but it becomes impossible to know how the average person performs in R&D without it. Which then returns us to the original question: "Based on what?"
Jobs functions will change over time. Not everyone will be able to do research roles, but robotics is far away from replacing human hands in any meaningful way. Humans need plumbers, home construction, healthcare professionals [0], teachers, judges, relationship driven roles (sales, account managers).
[0] - if robotics/ai can replace healthcare, healthcare costs would drop to zero...
1) Everything you've listed has finite demand, so cannot provide the 10,000x.
2) Robotics cannot drive costs to zero. Robots cost money and require maintenance.
Sure but at some point if literally everything tangible and essentially every imaginable commercial service can be done by robots and also designed by AI better than a human, humans are basically relegated to what kind of work? Something like being the exotic dancer or baby factory for a robot factory heir, or maybe a meat sacrifice on a Ukraine-esque battlefield to fight the other group of capital holders.
Increase Total Factor Productivity so that there's still just as much stuff to go around even with fewer people putting in less work to make the stuff.
UBI sees everyone receive an income, typically with a clawback mechanism. GBI sees an income paid to only those who need the support (means-based). The difference is subtle, I suppose, but could have a dramatic effect on what the studies show — or maybe not, I don't know. The key takeaway here is that I've never been able to find a UBI study to contrast the numerous GBI studies I am familiar with against. You spoke of UBI studies so I was hoping you'd be able to share. But, it seems not.
I don't understand the questions you are asking at the end. Apologies for not having a good answer.
My point was in response to the parent "there's a lot of things that need to change before we get to Star Trek Federation economy", I pointed out that we have done trials on UBI that seemed to work, maybe we should try that.
I was wondering if your correction from UBI to GBI changes that point; these trials seem to work and solve at least part of the problem that this whole thread discusses, so maybe we should try that at a national scale. Does GBI invalidate that?
The question asked which UBI studies you were talking about in order to close my gap in being unable to find any. It is clear now that they don't exist, which is fine, but a bit disappointing as I would have loved to see them. There are GBI studies abound, but it seems nobody is willing to try UBI.
I hadn't gone that deeply into the studies to work out the exact thing they were testing.
The core thing that the studies have proven, I understand, is that if you guarantee people a basic living income, they don't sit around doing drugs and watching TV (or at least not for long). Which is usually the main objection from naysayers - the Theory X hypothesis that people are lazy and must be forced to do anything useful. And this is the thing that is disproved by these studies.
You seem more familiar with them, though, is that your reading too?
