Who could have known the filthy boomers had the solution/playbook for the world of work in the age of AI?? #1463052

Previous technological disruptions have destroyed “jobs”. But they have not destroyed “work”, because they have created at least as many employment opportunities as redundancies — in many cases, far more.

"Perhaps artificial intelligence will end up the same way. Or maybe not."

That is, at its core, the question about AI and work: what's our human scarcity (#1559495), what can we do better/more efficiently than the machines? #1486740 what's our comparative advantage when infinite generation hits limited attention span/consumption of creation? #1467035 #1550071 #1553596

One response — articulated last week by Bill Gates — is that we should have jobs that are “human reserved” and cannot be filled by robots. Another is that we should all transition to a life of leisure, with our incomes provided through cash transfers and a universal basic income, or UBI.

Ah, yes! And the luxury boomer communists already live that way #1468968 #1521908

There is, however, a real-world trial that has been running in countries across the developed world and tells us something about what a world with UBI would look like. It is called the state pension: an essentially unconditional cash transfer to retirement-age adults.

I question the analogy here, for two reasons:

1. we (or at least the filthy boomers do) think of this as delayed income/just rewards from a life of work, not an "unconditional cash transfer"
2. they're likely to have very different societal and economic effects if given unconditionally against no effort (like a clear UBI to 20yo) vs delayed, at end of life, against employment history or entrepreneurial efforts in the labor market.

What’s immediately striking when you look at state pension schemes is that the image often conjured up when we talk about UBI — of people sitting around enjoying the government’s largesse — is mostly wrong. Take the UK, for instance, where many choose to work well beyond pension age. A minority continue in paid occupations that they enjoy, and others might take up paid work as a way to meet people.
But when we expand our definition of “work” to include voluntary labour of the kind that we would otherwise have to pay someone to do — childcare or providing “social infrastructure” by running an apartment block’s homeowners’ association, serving as a magistrate, volunteering as a tour guide at a museum or a gallery — things look rather different.

aaauw, that's so niiiiice. FUCK. THE. BOOMERS.

Of those who don’t do this, of course, some have delightful lives filled solely with leisure:they might go on long holidays, spend a lot of time at the cinema or concerts, read or play board games. But then there are those non-working pensioners who spend their time going down online rabbit holes becoming supporters of extreme ideologies of one kind or another. What the state pension experience also shows, then, is that when voluntary work dries up, that takes a psychological toll just as the loss of paid work does.

Ah yes, who are you, SN boomers?!

"although those of us who are middle-aged or older are not immune to extreme ideologies, the young are more likely to turn to violent means in pursuit of them."

Fine, but also... blueberries? #1545954

TLDR, it's a minimum wage or Nordic labor-market story: doing things inefficiently because we like the social outcomes

This is why Gates is right to advocate for some “human reserved” roles. Most of us who support minimum wages and some restrictions on the right of employers to fire at will know that these policies come with an economic cost. But we judge that the economic cost is worth the social benefit of a wage floor and some workplace restrictions.
in the age of AI, much of politics will be about figuring out the balance between the economic benefit of letting a machine do the work and the social benefit that most of us gain from working.

Whatchasay, stackers?

(Boomer opinions need not apply!)

archive: https://archive.md/5DYHB