A Celebration Society

Tag: guaranteed income

  • Robotic Evolution, Accelerating Automation, and Job Loss

    Robotic Evolution, Accelerating Automation, and Job Loss

    Researchers have recently figured out how to impart hive learning capabilities to robots. It’s particularly applicable to the kinds of complex tasks that require observation, trial, error, learning and further trials. This will enable them to collectively learn, in weeks, tasks that would have individually taken the robots years.

    Essentially, a group of identical robots are presented with the same learning challenge. They make various individual attempts to understand and master the task at hand. They compare notes, metaphorically speaking, learning from each others’ mistakes so there is no need for repetition. View here.

    It’s limited to motor skills at the moment, but I see no reason in principle why similar collaboration couldn’t be extended to mental tasks as well. (Robots are simply boxes with sensors and actuators, that afford AIs means to take actions in the physical world.)

    I’ve been criticized in some quarters for an overly aggressive view of how fast accelerating automation can rise to displace human workers. Even today, in the face of AI creativity across many fronts–from invention to musical composition to investment management to scientific discovery–pundits persist in maintaining that there are major domains of creativity and work that will remain uniquely human.

    They may be right, but the trends in AI and robotics certainly don’t support their confidence. Further, with such powerful evidence happening within a technological tidal wave of exponential progress, this confidence is not only unjustified but dangerous.

    Even though Ray Kurzweil’s work has recently transformed belief in the exponential acceleration of technology from heretical to orthodox, most of us nevertheless persist in projecting in a non-exponential way. Stop for a moment, and consider: the vegetation in a pond is doubling every day. The day before it fills the pond, the pond is half full of vegetation. Now comes the shocking part: all of the previous growth is matched by the last doubling, even if it had been growing for years. And that’s true of every previous doubling as well!

    This isn’t hypothetical. Computer power is driving most of the change on the planet. It’s been doubling roughly every two years, and the process has actually been speeding up. Now it’s closer to 18 months. It’s what’s driving automation, and the suddenly much-enhanced capabilities of AIs and robots.

    If massive numbers of jobs and indeed whole professions start to rapidly disappear in the 2020s, leaving multitudes of workers high and dry, I am certain that pundits who today deny the threat will not be the ones dealing with those displaced people, who may form angry mobs.

    The disconnect between the thinking about the technological aspects of accelerating automation, which tends to be deep and insightful, and the thinking about the social aspects of accelerating automation, which tends to be nonexistent or superficial, continues to greatly concern me.

    I agree with the Techno-utopians about the potential of accelerating automation and other technological advances to make society far better. Where we part ways is their nearly universal presumption that such advances are inevitable, and that rationality will govern society in the face of such extreme change.

    I can well understand uninformed people making such fundamental errors. I have a much harder time understanding such errors by the Techno-utopians, who tend to be among the best-educated and best-informed people in their countries.

    In many such countries, including some of the most technologically and economically advanced, large portions of the electorate have recently supported positions and persons inimical to reasoned progress. Consider the rising popularity of nationalist and demagogic parties in democracies across the globe, all offering simplistic messages of hope, uncoupled from evidence, wrapped in jingoism and demonizing “the other.”

    Even those techno-utopians who believe that accelerating automation will generate more jobs than it destroys should appreciate the fact that such jobs tend to be highly skilled, often requiring both training and numeracy beyond the abilities of most workers.

    Do they expect the displaced to go back to school, and learn newly necessary skills? Very well; that could happen, for some—though by no means all. And what if those newly skilled jobs start to become automated as well? How many times do they expect the displaced to retrain?

    Or, do they expect the displaced to gracefully become homeless, camping out on street corners and begging?

    More likely, they expect the displaced to become recipients of a universal basic income (UBI), as is being tested by Y Combinator in a new experiment. While I applaud that experiment, and indeed consider it one of the few conventional experiments capable of fostering wider adoption of such programs, the challenges remain far more daunting than most yet realize. (I explore those challenges here. OTOH, a paper introducing a new approach that appears to address all of those challenges is coming in early 2018.)

    I truly don’t understand how Techno-utopians, in particular, can dismiss these warning signs. All of this has happened in recent years, and we have only experienced the first waters of technological unemployment lapping at the shores. The tsunami is yet to come.

  • The Achilles Heel of Guaranteed Income Plans

    The Achilles Heel of Guaranteed Income Plans

    Most of us derive two entirely different things from work. Both are vital. The first is income, the second is meaning.

    I’ve been told that people who are given the opportunity for a guaranteed income manage to find their own meaning in short order. I would love to see this research, but so far it’s not been presented and I haven’t found it.

    Involuntary loss of job is actually a risk factor for suicide. Back in the 1990’s, IBM began switching from its long-standing policy of a guaranteed job for life to a more conventional policy.

    According to my wife, who was with IBM for 22 years and witnessed this unfolding, when IBM began encouraging people to leave the company they didn’t just offer attractive severance packages.

    IBM also provided a (mandatory) two-week counseling process. The purpose of the counseling was to assure that the departing employee found meaning in life after IBM.

    The reason this was considered so important was that IBM’s research had determined that employees who separated from the employer and did not have a continuing sense of meaning in life significantly elevated risk of suicide.

    It didn’t matter so much where the meaning came from. it could be spending time with grandkids, volunteering in a church, or some other activity that involved contributing to other people’s lives. IBM was determined that each departing employee identify something of this nature before they were let go.

    Being a large, highly successful company, IBM doesn’t like to waste money. The fact that they did this highlights the importance of meeting for people who no longer find it from their work. Research does exist supporting this. Indeed, one study found that “social exclusion could threaten people at such a basic level that it would impair their sense of meaningful existence “ (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2717555/)

    A guaranteed income does not and never will provide meaning, regardless of which form it takes. At best, it could offer people the necessities of life—if that. But meaning comes from our social connections, and if a guaranteed income replaces the loss of a job those connections will remain lost. Many of those who are about to become technologically unemployed will not have an IBM looking out for them. They will need a different way to find meaning in their lives.

    The Citizen Income of a Celebration Society addresses the need for meaning by its very nature. It’s certainly not the only solution to this problem, but it is a solution.

  • Citizen Income Vs. Guaranteed Income

    Citizen Income Vs. Guaranteed Income

    I’ve written elsewhere about the many hurdles standing between the beautiful idea of a guaranteed income and its actual implementation in a way that takes care of all the people.

     Briefly, all approaches to a guaranteed income (universal, basic and minimum) share certain characteristics. They propose that everyone in the society–or at least all of those in a broad class such as adult citizens–are assured of some minimum level of monthly cash.

    This is an inherently confrontational, scarcity-based solution to a problem that is best answered from the context of abundance. First, all such schemes are proposed on the basis of somehow taking away money and other assets from those who are wealthy, have a high income (not the same as wealthy), or who own the means of production. Without passing moral judgment on the rightness or wrongness of such a concept, I simply observe that it is a substantial hurdle.The very people expected to pay for this are those most adroit at avoiding taxation , getting laws passed or modified to suit them, or moving their assets abroad.

     Second, this is not a hurdle in a single nation,  but in every nation. In our interconnected world, as conditions continue to destabilize due to  accelerating change, greater numbers of people will be seeking to relocate from one country to another.
    Imagine if a city implements such an income, as has been proposed. What will keep people from leaving other cities that lack such an income? It’s not just a problem with cities within nations. In Europe, the rules allow EU residents to freely travel across borders. If any EU nation institutes a guaranteed income by itself, it had better prepare for an upsurge in immigrants. This will strain the social fabric.

    The availability of such an income, even if delayed for a time due to citizenship requirements, would be an almost irresistible attractor. Already, there is much nativist sentiment arising in Europe and United States. It will get far worse with a guaranteed income.

    Essentially, those who advocate a guaranteed income are attempting to solve a problem associated with the uprising of planetary abundance from within the context of the Scarcity Game.

    It may work in wealthy, homogenous nations, if they can protect their borders. But in  divided nations, the reaction will be quite different. In such nations, for many years to come, a guaranteed income will be derided as socialism, and for many recipients there will be a sense of shame in accepting the money. This is not a way to create meaning.

    All these problems with the guaranteed income can be addressed within the Celebrationist model. First, the entire society will be a consensual co-creation of the various residents/owners. If some kind of guaranteed income were to exist in such a society, no one would be able to say that it was imposed upon them from above.

    Second, in a Celebration Society, Citizen will be a hard-won office; a position of respect. While this office will potentially be available to every resident, not everyone will seek it nor qualify for it. The income will be paid not just for holding the office of Citizen, but for one’s sworn availability to be of service in the government.

    Only Citizens will have roles in the government . Duties will include jury duty, occasional service via lottery selection as members of Parliament, and-most vital – a deep knowledge of the Charter and the society’s laws, and vigilance about assuring that these are respected and that the government has integrity.

    If a Citizen were called upon to work several hours per week, which would, in my estimation, ordinarily be the case unless one were serving a single term in Parliament, no one would ever call such a situation welfare. Such service would be respected, and even esteemed. It would be meaningful, and useful to the society.

    This income would be paid from the two basic sources of societal revenues. First, as a tourist destination, the society would charge most visitors a daily fee equivalent to DisneyWorld. Second, those people as well as residents and Citizens would purchase things. Since a consumption tax favors savings and long term investments, and treats everyone the same based on their consumption levels, I’d favor that a simple flat consumption tax be charged on all transactions. This should be limited by Charter to some modest level such as 15%, with no exemptions. (That fact plus an all-electronic monetary system would largely eliminate tax system manipulation.) Eventually, with full Celebrationist systems of production, even those taxes would likely be phased out.

    No forced redistribution of wealth would be required, and this might even be a culture wherein those Citizens who did not need the Citizen income would be encouraged to return it to the General Welfare Fund, so that others such as residents who are in need would be cared for. This is part of the whole societal concept of “paying it forward”.

    A guaranteed income is at best a palliative; at worst a mirage. We can do better, and we must.