The optimism that you describe in your intro is, ehm, let's call it interesting, in light of current developments in the USA, and the historical (lack of?) successes at redistribution...
Of the developed world the US is the most unequal when it comes to the (re)distribution of income and wealth. (Not even speaking of global inequality). And the direction the current administration is taking seems not to be aimed at a fairer division of spoils, rather the opposite instead. Whether or not you'd call that a success, or a lack thereof, depends on your perspective, but relative to other nations I would say it isn't, and it's moving in the wrong direction. So it's nice to be optimistic, it's just not a given that the spoils of a robotic future would be fairly distributed, definitely not in the current political climate.
The US redistributes $2.7 trillion annually, the majority of which is mysteriously excluded from the Gini index (including Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, EITC and Housing subsidies). In total, we redistribute an average of $45k per poor household annually. When looked at after taxes and including the transfers which have been excluded for rhetorical distortion, our Gini goes down to slightly better than average among developed nations (.22).
Anyone can argue whether this is too high or too low, but you can’t argue that this represents a “historical lack of success at redistribution”, even compared to the extreme nations of Scandinavia.
I agree with your take on the current administration, but would take exception with your definition of the “fair distribution of spoils”. Probably off subject though.
My point is that the US — and all other developed economies for that matter — have historically been amazingly open to redistribution. As conditions change and work is increasingly outsourced to AI, I see no reason to see this position reversed.
I don't know where you get the 0.22 Gini from? Can't seem to find that number anywhere myself, but I'd be interested to see sources for this to check. Most reports I find insist that the US remains amongst the most unequal in the developed world.
But I looked around a bit and you're right that, independent of exact numbers, there is quite some redistribution within the US. Probably enough to call it at least a partial succes ;-)
I could now move to global inequality, considering the reality of modern supply chains, but really it's almost weekend and I'd much rather just enjoy myself and have a beer, so cheers. ;-)
Thanks! It's not entirely surprising that it's based on Cato Institute data though... Their ideological bias is quite pronounced. If I look here at Our world in data, the .4 Gini is already post-tax. Maybe there still are some benefits not included, but that goes both ways; Most importantly capital gains aren't even included, and that's a massive income source for the top X%. https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality-before-and-after-taxes
The question might have been, is it avoidable? I think you won that debate, as it's a pretty safe bet that people will continue to display the same greed that they've shown in the past. I think Brian won the debate over whether or not that approach is the best we should hope for, though sadly it may be the best we CAN hope for. Big Tech no longer has a great track record; in so many ways it has come to resemble the 1880's to 1920's version of capitalism than the "don't be evil" version it got us to believe it was a century later. Yesterday early morning I asked the guys who were getting ready to trim our trees (i.e. serious and dangerous manual labor) if I could get them anything, and one replied, with a cynical smile, "a college degree", which was very funny but also sad, and it reminded me of this argument. Yes, let's automate out all of the thankless jobs and adapt socially to create better, more meaningful work. But literally starting off by taking away jobs of artists and writers and other creatives? Is this some kind of bad joke by the perps who brought us the cesspool of X and called it joining hands across the world?
“And our basic stance is that society needs to develop institutions to make sure that the wealth from automation is widely distributed throughout society.” You mean you want to fight a civil war with all the death and destruction it will take to achieve this goal.
It's one thing to argue that historically speaking war is the only crisis capable of producing those institutions and that 'getting through it' may actually be much more grim than touched on, but Noah never once said he wants a civil war and the intendent death and destruction and it's pretty weird to imply that he did. If anything he's written often about how horrible it would be
What I tried to say is that idea of widely distributing wealth without a civil war is a pipe dream. It’s a very easy thing to say but nearly impossible to achieve in practice in our country. Noah is trafficking in fantasy with this statement.
Not clear it will be much of a war. The most recent US opinion research on this question asks what should happen if robots / AI can do everything better than humans such that few humans have traditional jobs any longer and the robot/AI companies are making enormous profits. 62.8% of respondents said "these profits should be shared with the broader public". compared to 21.7% who said "these profits belong to the companies and their shareholders." The "war" will be between capital and (un)labor, but capital will be too smart to fight that war -- they will sue for peace on acceptable terms.
Shouldn't we need less redistribution in the face of technology that makes society so much richer? Even if the gains aren't equally shared, if the gains are large enough, it seems strange to believe that the worst-off people are going to get zero or negative gains, especially if we are holding our currently existing systems of redistribution constant.
"I’m far more optimistic; I don’t think the Sam Altmans of the world will ultimately have that much power over our institutions.."
I disagree with your premise that the wealthy will throw open their vaults and shower the rest of society with their wealth. Certainly, politicians will not force them to do that. The supreme court is going to rule that the wealthy will be able to interfere in future elections even more than Musk did in the previous election.
"The Supreme Court on Tuesday considered a challenge to a federal law limiting the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with a candidate for office. During over two hours of oral argument in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, some of the justices were sympathetic to the challengers’ position that the coordinated expenditure limits violate the First Amendment."
I'm dumb and disconnected and haven't been to a debate like this in person - do the people ringing bells when Noah mentions abundance (assuming he's doing a nod to the abundance agenda) agree and like the abundance reference, or disagree with and dislike the abundance reference?
So difficult to predict how a particular technological technological advance will affect peoples' lives, in large part because technological advances do not happen in isolation. There will be other advances, some modifying this one, some apparently unrelated. Even in retrospect it is difficult (and open to vast oversimplification) to state the effects of the printing press, the automobile, or television.
What is clear to me is that it is misleading to ask whether "societies are immeasurably better" due to these technological advances. This implies that human beings have a choice.
Yes, bands of people can keep new technologies out of their village, and nations can push back against technology. But technology will keep advancing somewhere, and those places that advance it will ride roughshod over those that fell behind. That's the overwhelming theme of human history.
It's understandable to want to celebrate the ways in which technology makes us safer and more secure and comfortable. But understand that by defending technology in those terms, you also create a backlash amongst the millions that are discontent with this safer, more secure, more comfortable. Maybe their communities or jobs were destroyed. Maybe their psychological needs were not met as thoroughly as their physical ones. Or maybe, just maybe, they have this ongoing unease that the new ease and comfort is making their society unfit to survive into the future.
That last discontent, generally a subtext of right wing thought, is understandable. (It's been around as long as there has been technological progress, which is to say thousands of years.) But it is 100% incorrect, and rarely gets answered directly.
The society that survives going forward is not going to be the one most suited for hunting mastodons, it is the one that proves the most technologically adept and then adapts its life to the technology.
We march forward technologically not because it will necessarily make us richer or more comfortable but because we want the society that contains our children and our grandchildren to thrive.
"Yes, bands of people can keep new technologies out of their village, and nations can push back against technology. But technology will keep advancing somewhere, and those places that advance it will ride roughshod over those that fell behind. That's the overwhelming theme of human history."
Yes and no. Fascism seems pretty good at freezing progress in its tracks (Spain, Portugal) while democracies tend to leave said fascists and other "bands of people" (the Amish, N. Korea) alone...
IMO, we're (democracies/western/developped countries) no longer in an extractive system where invading and pillaging or even colonizing a different place makes a lot of sense the way it did in the 19C or before...
In my mind, there is a lot of wishful thinking here.
In our recent "less extractive" system, I have a feeling that you would be no more enthusiastic than I am at the thought of your children and grandchildren facing a future in a nation falling behind technologically. Less invading and formal colonizing than in the past, absolutely true, but realistically less important to the rest of the world when it was "only" happening to the technologically backward... And even when nothing so dramatic occurred, the power imbalance had very really consequences for ordinary people.
But more importantly, the idea that "we're no longer in" a system of blunt international force strikes me as a deep fallacy. That's the way it's been through your (and all but the beginning of my) life, but there's little evidence that that is the future. ESPECIALLY as the nation most invested in maintaining this system simultaneously cedes its technological edge and its diplomatic edge. My guess is that the US will find it at least marginally easier to restore democracy than to recover the damage to those underlying sources of strength, meaning that the other powerful countries of the world will have more sway as to the way weaker countries are treated in the future.
AI replacing human jobs, is this amazing set up for comedy! Just have a robot replace everyday tasks, and it's the classic "haste makes waste," and/or the benefits the robot brings...but all the unforseen mishaps that come with humans trying to over compensate, or replace (work) necessary for their development as a Race...
I find your hubris disturbing. All those technologies were to assist mankind. Assist with daily tasks, making us more efficient.
AGI robots will be to replace humans, not labor, as the ones above. You have only a guess based on a point of view. AGI is not like anything humans have developed. The law of unintended consequences is immutable.
I hope you are right. I see the potential to end suffering on earth. That said, I am equally open to massive job loss, humans growing up with no purpose. Not having a purpose is soul-destroying. Humans need purpose. That is my fear. I certainly wouldn’t have your hubris to assume “we’ll just figure it out.” You're betting humanity on that hubris.
The optimism that you describe in your intro is, ehm, let's call it interesting, in light of current developments in the USA, and the historical (lack of?) successes at redistribution...
Isn’t redistribution widespread across the US (and every developed nation, for that matter)?
Of the developed world the US is the most unequal when it comes to the (re)distribution of income and wealth. (Not even speaking of global inequality). And the direction the current administration is taking seems not to be aimed at a fairer division of spoils, rather the opposite instead. Whether or not you'd call that a success, or a lack thereof, depends on your perspective, but relative to other nations I would say it isn't, and it's moving in the wrong direction. So it's nice to be optimistic, it's just not a given that the spoils of a robotic future would be fairly distributed, definitely not in the current political climate.
The US redistributes $2.7 trillion annually, the majority of which is mysteriously excluded from the Gini index (including Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, EITC and Housing subsidies). In total, we redistribute an average of $45k per poor household annually. When looked at after taxes and including the transfers which have been excluded for rhetorical distortion, our Gini goes down to slightly better than average among developed nations (.22).
Anyone can argue whether this is too high or too low, but you can’t argue that this represents a “historical lack of success at redistribution”, even compared to the extreme nations of Scandinavia.
I agree with your take on the current administration, but would take exception with your definition of the “fair distribution of spoils”. Probably off subject though.
My point is that the US — and all other developed economies for that matter — have historically been amazingly open to redistribution. As conditions change and work is increasingly outsourced to AI, I see no reason to see this position reversed.
I don't know where you get the 0.22 Gini from? Can't seem to find that number anywhere myself, but I'd be interested to see sources for this to check. Most reports I find insist that the US remains amongst the most unequal in the developed world.
But I looked around a bit and you're right that, independent of exact numbers, there is quite some redistribution within the US. Probably enough to call it at least a partial succes ;-)
I could now move to global inequality, considering the reality of modern supply chains, but really it's almost weekend and I'd much rather just enjoy myself and have a beer, so cheers. ;-)
Here is where I got the number.
https://www.manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2018-6-2-some-real-information-on-poverty-and-income-inequality
Thanks! It's not entirely surprising that it's based on Cato Institute data though... Their ideological bias is quite pronounced. If I look here at Our world in data, the .4 Gini is already post-tax. Maybe there still are some benefits not included, but that goes both ways; Most importantly capital gains aren't even included, and that's a massive income source for the top X%. https://ourworldindata.org/income-inequality-before-and-after-taxes
The question might have been, is it avoidable? I think you won that debate, as it's a pretty safe bet that people will continue to display the same greed that they've shown in the past. I think Brian won the debate over whether or not that approach is the best we should hope for, though sadly it may be the best we CAN hope for. Big Tech no longer has a great track record; in so many ways it has come to resemble the 1880's to 1920's version of capitalism than the "don't be evil" version it got us to believe it was a century later. Yesterday early morning I asked the guys who were getting ready to trim our trees (i.e. serious and dangerous manual labor) if I could get them anything, and one replied, with a cynical smile, "a college degree", which was very funny but also sad, and it reminded me of this argument. Yes, let's automate out all of the thankless jobs and adapt socially to create better, more meaningful work. But literally starting off by taking away jobs of artists and writers and other creatives? Is this some kind of bad joke by the perps who brought us the cesspool of X and called it joining hands across the world?
“No human should be condemned to do work that can be performed by machines.”
- Roberto Unger
“And our basic stance is that society needs to develop institutions to make sure that the wealth from automation is widely distributed throughout society.” You mean you want to fight a civil war with all the death and destruction it will take to achieve this goal.
It's one thing to argue that historically speaking war is the only crisis capable of producing those institutions and that 'getting through it' may actually be much more grim than touched on, but Noah never once said he wants a civil war and the intendent death and destruction and it's pretty weird to imply that he did. If anything he's written often about how horrible it would be
What I tried to say is that idea of widely distributing wealth without a civil war is a pipe dream. It’s a very easy thing to say but nearly impossible to achieve in practice in our country. Noah is trafficking in fantasy with this statement.
That's fair
Not clear it will be much of a war. The most recent US opinion research on this question asks what should happen if robots / AI can do everything better than humans such that few humans have traditional jobs any longer and the robot/AI companies are making enormous profits. 62.8% of respondents said "these profits should be shared with the broader public". compared to 21.7% who said "these profits belong to the companies and their shareholders." The "war" will be between capital and (un)labor, but capital will be too smart to fight that war -- they will sue for peace on acceptable terms.
Shouldn't we need less redistribution in the face of technology that makes society so much richer? Even if the gains aren't equally shared, if the gains are large enough, it seems strange to believe that the worst-off people are going to get zero or negative gains, especially if we are holding our currently existing systems of redistribution constant.
The worst off will be better off and we will need more redistribution. Current systems are largely dependent on working.
"I’m far more optimistic; I don’t think the Sam Altmans of the world will ultimately have that much power over our institutions.."
I disagree with your premise that the wealthy will throw open their vaults and shower the rest of society with their wealth. Certainly, politicians will not force them to do that. The supreme court is going to rule that the wealthy will be able to interfere in future elections even more than Musk did in the previous election.
"The Supreme Court on Tuesday considered a challenge to a federal law limiting the amount of money that political parties can spend in coordination with a candidate for office. During over two hours of oral argument in National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, some of the justices were sympathetic to the challengers’ position that the coordinated expenditure limits violate the First Amendment."
I'm dumb and disconnected and haven't been to a debate like this in person - do the people ringing bells when Noah mentions abundance (assuming he's doing a nod to the abundance agenda) agree and like the abundance reference, or disagree with and dislike the abundance reference?
The bell was the signal that my time was up!
It is not possible to have a world full of AI and robots and not have standard of living go to the moon.
So difficult to predict how a particular technological technological advance will affect peoples' lives, in large part because technological advances do not happen in isolation. There will be other advances, some modifying this one, some apparently unrelated. Even in retrospect it is difficult (and open to vast oversimplification) to state the effects of the printing press, the automobile, or television.
What is clear to me is that it is misleading to ask whether "societies are immeasurably better" due to these technological advances. This implies that human beings have a choice.
Yes, bands of people can keep new technologies out of their village, and nations can push back against technology. But technology will keep advancing somewhere, and those places that advance it will ride roughshod over those that fell behind. That's the overwhelming theme of human history.
It's understandable to want to celebrate the ways in which technology makes us safer and more secure and comfortable. But understand that by defending technology in those terms, you also create a backlash amongst the millions that are discontent with this safer, more secure, more comfortable. Maybe their communities or jobs were destroyed. Maybe their psychological needs were not met as thoroughly as their physical ones. Or maybe, just maybe, they have this ongoing unease that the new ease and comfort is making their society unfit to survive into the future.
That last discontent, generally a subtext of right wing thought, is understandable. (It's been around as long as there has been technological progress, which is to say thousands of years.) But it is 100% incorrect, and rarely gets answered directly.
The society that survives going forward is not going to be the one most suited for hunting mastodons, it is the one that proves the most technologically adept and then adapts its life to the technology.
We march forward technologically not because it will necessarily make us richer or more comfortable but because we want the society that contains our children and our grandchildren to thrive.
"Yes, bands of people can keep new technologies out of their village, and nations can push back against technology. But technology will keep advancing somewhere, and those places that advance it will ride roughshod over those that fell behind. That's the overwhelming theme of human history."
Yes and no. Fascism seems pretty good at freezing progress in its tracks (Spain, Portugal) while democracies tend to leave said fascists and other "bands of people" (the Amish, N. Korea) alone...
IMO, we're (democracies/western/developped countries) no longer in an extractive system where invading and pillaging or even colonizing a different place makes a lot of sense the way it did in the 19C or before...
In my mind, there is a lot of wishful thinking here.
In our recent "less extractive" system, I have a feeling that you would be no more enthusiastic than I am at the thought of your children and grandchildren facing a future in a nation falling behind technologically. Less invading and formal colonizing than in the past, absolutely true, but realistically less important to the rest of the world when it was "only" happening to the technologically backward... And even when nothing so dramatic occurred, the power imbalance had very really consequences for ordinary people.
But more importantly, the idea that "we're no longer in" a system of blunt international force strikes me as a deep fallacy. That's the way it's been through your (and all but the beginning of my) life, but there's little evidence that that is the future. ESPECIALLY as the nation most invested in maintaining this system simultaneously cedes its technological edge and its diplomatic edge. My guess is that the US will find it at least marginally easier to restore democracy than to recover the damage to those underlying sources of strength, meaning that the other powerful countries of the world will have more sway as to the way weaker countries are treated in the future.
The solution is / will be a job guarantee as part of a full employment fiscal policy. Ubi generates too much pushback. There is always enough to do.
AI replacing human jobs, is this amazing set up for comedy! Just have a robot replace everyday tasks, and it's the classic "haste makes waste," and/or the benefits the robot brings...but all the unforseen mishaps that come with humans trying to over compensate, or replace (work) necessary for their development as a Race...
Noah, you picking cotton is hilarious. Sorry. I'm dying. 🤣
Noah
I find your hubris disturbing. All those technologies were to assist mankind. Assist with daily tasks, making us more efficient.
AGI robots will be to replace humans, not labor, as the ones above. You have only a guess based on a point of view. AGI is not like anything humans have developed. The law of unintended consequences is immutable.
I hope you are right. I see the potential to end suffering on earth. That said, I am equally open to massive job loss, humans growing up with no purpose. Not having a purpose is soul-destroying. Humans need purpose. That is my fear. I certainly wouldn’t have your hubris to assume “we’ll just figure it out.” You're betting humanity on that hubris.