Comments by "Fredinno" (@innosam123) on "Whatifalthist"
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Jackson Wu So what’s the solution? We already have a welfare state. We already effectively HAVE UBI for poor people, and if everyone makes 0 income, then it’s a UBI in effect anyways. Yay! You made sure nobody starves! Society has still imploded, and humanity has no idea what to do with itself with no work. Not everyone, but some people, are going to go crazy - humans are not designed to sit around and do nothing.
Marxism doesn’t work. Honestly, Capitalism kind of has to exist unless we live in a society where literally everything (including time) is infinite, because money is how humans allocate limited resources. Which is probably impossible.
Truth be told, we don’t have any idea. None of the ideas proposed by people present an actual solution, and won’t, unless work is replaced by something else.
Honestly, a human-level or super-human level AI able to beat humans on everything is unlikely to get too far. Either everyone decides not to open or use that box, or they end up replacing or assimilating with humanity.
Really, a human-level AI is really just an artificial humanoid in most respects. We’d be replacing humanity... by making new humans. Humans that also *consume*, in one form or another. The last things AI will replace are the last things that will separate the two (likely something like consciousness and free thought).
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Jackson Wu Thing is that ‘increased consumption’ often involves the increase in demand for old jobs- like Horticulture, which has really taken off in recent years due to increased consumption and is difficult to automate. Construction is also not all that easy to automate either, and people wanting bigger houses and more kids if they have more money isn’t hard to imagine (it’s actually kind of a trend). Modular Construction has existed for years and will honestly likely never become mainstream. People just don’t like them, and they’re not flexible. Psychology is also a difficult field to automate, and is becoming more prevalent as a consequence of technology (not exactly for good reasons, but...)
There is a reason we all still have jobs despite eliminating so many already.
Also, demographics means that the labour pool of most industrial nations will shrink or stagnate, meaning consumption will increase as there are fewer people to work... we’ve seen this before in Japan, and the net result, despite high levels of automation isn’t no jobs, it’s the reverse. Unemployment rarely goes above 5% despite being in a recession for over 2 decades. Any serious loss of jobs are counteracting the lack of workforce available in the first place.
The biggest threat for jobs may actually be in the third world, where wages increasingly matter more vs education and infrastructure. People in the First World have much more flexibility in getting and creating new jobs. If a factory can produce shorts cheaper than any wage worker, but needs to have educated engineers behind the scenes, the former isn’t going to get a job. And they have no consumer base to back into.
This is already happening in the textile industry. https://youtu.be/OsSDI8wWAyQ
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With the last one, we really have no idea what we should do if no jobs exist. There is no real precedent, and the ones we kind of have (communities where everyone is on welfare and unemployed) are... not promising.
I don’t believe we can decouple work from that innate human need. Human Psychology ingrained over eons of evolution can’t be reversed in a couple decades. Science has yet to find a way to actually fulfill a psychological need with a pill or some other substitute. The primary ways to deal with a psychological problem right now are dealing with its effects and fulfilling the need that isn’t being met.
We aren’t going to solve the problem on the first try- or solve it by theory anyways. Historically, the most likely option is the natural one- Darwinianism - until we find the right solution.
Meaning pain. Lots of pain.
I personally think that we’re ultimately never going to create many intelligent/sentient AI, and that technology will eventually stagnate. That effectively means there will still be a decent number of jobs around, and we don’t have to deal with the AI can of worms.
That’s not really make-work, just normal work. Solving the problem by never entering the problem to begin with.
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Jackson Wu Well, people could conceivably hire more landscapers to take care of their yards, considering that’s not that common.
You could make the same argument with other sectors. How much food do people really need?
Who is mandating these jobs? Why are they being paid when they’re unproductive?
Now, *mind you*, there are definitely cases where this does happen, or people are made to work longer than they should or need to because it seems it would improve profits when it doesn’t. This isn’t a stable state though, and eventually changes because the market self-corrects because people find out those positions aren’t needed or hours can be reduced without losing production. (see: Adoption of 4-Day workweek)
But for the most part, if you’re able to find someone to pay for something, it may be useless from a certain perspective, but it’s probably not, because people are clearly *paying for it*, because they want it. For example, Christmas trees are kind of useless from a practical perspective, but it’s a Billion-Dollar Industry. Most supplements and beauty products are useless. And yet people pay for that shit. A lot.
Nothing is useless from an economic perspective if there is organic demand for it. Jobs are not ‘made up’ for no reason. They are satisfying actual demand. If I could get people to buy trash off me for a cent per ton, and there was demand for it, the jobs that are created selling trash are no less fake than that of farming food. If I wasn’t selling trash, that demand would go unfulfilled. Would it seriously negatively impact the people who didn’t get the trash? No, probably not. But that doesn’t matter.
The entire economy is honestly ‘made up’. The entire concept of money is an abstract thing that doesn’t actually exist except in our minds. Bills aren’t money. They’re paper. What people want to trade the paper for depends on the people who hold them. And them moving that paper around is fundamentally what drives the economy and creates jobs.
But that raises the question of what you would use to define productivity if profit isn’t it? The two primary drivers of technology through history are self-interest to generate profit, and war.
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Aran Butcher The Americans basically started funding the opposite side in the Mexican Campaign literally right after the Civil War. The French saw where things were going and gave up despite nearly conquering all of Mexico.
It’s not even good for the French on the long run, the Americans, British and Germans can start a multi-front war against France in WW1. Remember who was in charge of foreign relations in Germany at the time.
North and Northeastern Brazil are mostly multiracial, not Black. They had plenty of white settlers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazilians
They just mostly bred with Blacks and Natives.
Which might end up happening here if they’re not being overly racist. Remember that they can’t use slavery in the late Victorian age and the Blacks were still fairly sparse.
I was referring to places like Townsville. Not the most populous part of Australia, but not empty either. Remember that Australia had a fairly low number of migrants for its carrying capacity, so obviously everyone took the best land first.
Libya and Eritrea are also as hot as West Africa, but had no issues finding Italian settlers. Libya is even worse because most of it is pretty marginal.
Britain viewed France as a rival right up until Germany started being more of a threat.
Maybe they could take Patagonia while Chile and Argentina were still disorganized, since it wasn’t actually under their control yet and thus the British may just let it slide. But it’s really only all that good for wool and has a population today of 2 million. South Island in NZ may also have been colonized if France was more organized. Which actually has good farmland, but it’s also tiny. It has only 1.16 million today, and even though it has an agricultural surplus, it can’t absorb all that many people.
West Africa and the Sahel are breadbaskets if you have the infrastructure to support it.
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StrategicFooyoo 1. China is a developing nation with less ability to pay. Absolute Debt does not matter, only relative debt.
If I make $1000 a month and am in debt $10,000, I can probably pay it off. If I make $100 a month and am in debt $10,000, I’m screwed.
Assuming you trust official public & private debt and GDP figures, China’s facing a financial crisis. If you don’t, they’re facing economic collapse.
The US already had a financial crisis, and public&private debt-to-GDP has been on the decline since.
Also, much of their debt is denominated in foreign currency.
“Unfounded liabilities” are not debt. They’re designated future possible debt that would materialize if the US Government can’t find more money (taxes) cut benefits, or cut interest (ie. asking the Fed for money without going through the bond market, allowing for the direct printing of money).
2. China nukes US ships. Then what? You’ve basically set a precedent where the USA can now nuke all Chinese Naval bases (and ships), thus making the maneuver pointless. You’re still trapped.
Geography also dooms it, because unless you also take out all American military bases in the 1st Island Chain, China, air power can also be used to interrupt shipping. That’s still not a guarantee, because you can use pretty much any flat, empty strip that’s long enough as an air strip.
This discounts drone warfare, and the fact that US foreign and trade policy is in a state of disorganized, self-injuring flux as it reorganizes against China.
That assumes the USA hasn’t already destroyed all those naval and coastal air bases, which tends to happen in a naval war.
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