Report Card for Donald Trump

[David Horn]

(01-06-2017, 03:53 PM)SomeGuy Wrote:

(01-06-2017, 03:41 PM)David Horn Wrote:

(01-05-2017, 04:30 PM)SomeGuy Wrote: Are there going to be issues?  Of course there are, but fixating solely on the issue of automation and the apparent concomitant need for a basic income to go along with it misses the point entirely.  How do we reconcile our productive technical capacity with our consumption?  How is our productive capacity (and the inputs it requires) distributed?  If there is a basic income (like, say, a universal Social Security regardless of age), how much does it give out?  How is that figure adjusted, and who (what?) adjusts it?  Where does that money go as it is presumably spent on things?  Is it taxed back out of circulation?  Who is taxing it?  Who is being taxed?  If we aren't using something recognizable as money, how are allocation and distribution being handled instead?  What is being produced, and how is that decided?  How are all of these decisions being made and remade according to conditions?  We don't know, and since the conditions in question are at this point largely hypothetical and will be for some time, we can't know, and so all of this handwringing about the RISE OF THE MACHINES is, at this point, ahistorical and entirely beside the point.

None of this will affect me directly, but it may affect my  son and will certainly affect my grandchildren.  That said, deriving a solution to an amorphous problem that will arrive at some as yet undetermined time is an exercise in futility ... mostly.  A large percentage of the new ideas we develop originated in sci-fi decades ago.  There's hope.

That's part of the reason why I have been so dismissive of the latest panic over automation I have been seeing recently.  It's neither a new technical development, and I have been reading SF stories exploring this idea since I was a child.  You should check out Bruce Sterling, Dave Marusek, etc. for some ideas.  It's pretty old hat to me at this point, at least as an idea.  And, as you said, trying to derive "a solution to an amorphous problem that will arrive at some as yet undetermined time is an exercise in futility", and doesn't really tell us what we should do about problems right now.  In my first post in this thread, I outlined some things I'd like to see.

Yeah, but there is also the issue of inertia.  If we design a fix suitable for today, it must be adjustable later as times and situations change.  We humans tend to like fixed solutions -- especially the more conservative among us.  Since we seem destined to be a conservative nation with only brief bursts of progressivism, let's plan on that.  Fair disclosure: I have not the slightest idea how to make that happen, only that it should must.