Orionworks - Steven Vincent Johnson <orionwo...@charter.net> wrote: > If I had a guaranteed income I would have no interest spending all my > "free" time day sitting on my fat ass doing nothing more than watching > football or porn on my monitor. Nor would I be interested in consuming > booze or sampling prostitutes. I want to DO SOMETHING with the free time I > now have at my disposal! SOMETHING USEFUL. SOMETHING PRODUCTIVE THAT > HOPEFULLY, ULTIMATELY BENEFITS SOCIETY. . . . > Clarke thought a lot about the effects of unlimited wealth. He wrote that for every person who would waste time, many others would make useful contributions even if they were not paid. I agree with that. I know several independently wealthy people who can do anything they want. They spend all their time doing useful things. Even boring things. I mean they work 10 and 12 hours a day.
Most "retired" professors such as Fleischmann and Mizuno are like that. Carol Storms once said to Ed, "we are getting old and someday we may have to think about moving to a retirement home." Ed responded: "Don't bother. Just take me out back and shoot me." Clarke himself had a long list of projects he was working on when he died. His secretary sent me a copy of the last edition of it, as a keepsake. If humanity is granted unlimited wealth in the future I do not think there will be a problem finding people to do valuable jobs such as scientific research, medicine, architecture, piloting airplanes, running gigantic indoor factories and so on. Here is the problem though . . . At this moment in history, there are jobs which people will not do voluntarily, such as collecting garbage and working as a field laborer on a farm, or working in a fast food restaurant, or rote assembly in a factory production line. Okay, a few people might do them but nowhere near as many as we need. At this moment in history, we are in an awkward transition. A few decades ago we needed large numbers of people to do tedious labor. Fifty to 100 years from now we will not need anyone to do that. Robots will do all tedious jobs -- plus many interesting jobs that people would like to do. If by some magic everyone were granted $100,000 a year without triggering inflation, we would still have the problem that boring tedious jobs would not be done. People would not work in farms or fast food restaurants. On the other hand, suppose a basic income of $10,000 per person was provided to every adult. That's not enough to live on. People might gather together in groups of 5 or so, in a house, and live on $50,000 a year, but that still is not much. With that kind of basic income, most people will still want to work to make extra income. Many unskilled people will be willing to do boring jobs such as working in fast food restaurants. They will not be willing to work at very low wages. This will push up the wages paid to the bottom tier of workers. In my opinion that would be a good thing for everyone! If everyone worked for at least $20 an hour, even people at McDonald's and people doing farm field work, the cost of food would go up, but dire poverty would vanish. The kinds of situations that Linda Tirado describes would vanish: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2014/12/linda_tirado_on_the_realities_of_living_in_bootstrap_america_daily_annoyances.html This would put pressure on McDonald's and on farmers to automate more quickly, to reduce the number of low-wage workers. That would also be a good thing -- because everyone would have the $10,000 to fall back on.(McDonald's and farms will all be automated sooner or later. It might as well be sooner.) So, during this transition, I favor a guaranteed income that is enough to keep a person from starving but not enough to remove all incentives to work, even at jobs which are tedious and unrewarding. Let me add a few other thoughts about this topic. In the past, when people did not work, that was morally repugnant. We needed everyone to contribute. Furthermore, even today most people who did not have a job feel left out of society. They did not have an identity. Even today when you ask someone "who are you?" Most people say "I'm a plumber" or a programmer or an electrochemist. With increased wealth and robot labor, there will be no jobs for people. Most people are going to have to find a way to live a fulfilling life at leisure with no permanent occupation. That may be a difficult transition. We are also going to have to persuade conservative people that it is okay for a large fraction of the population to slack off and do nothing productive. Many of them still think that is repugnant. I myself feel that as long as everyone gets what they need robot labor, I could not care less how other people spend their time. It is no longer a moral issue in any sense. Once resources become unlimited who cares how much other people take up? Imagine a few hundred years ago a wealthy person living in a small town buys thousands of books, puts them in his house and does not let other people read them. I would have said to that person: "This is foolish and greedy. You should establish a library. You can't read every book yourself, every minute of the day. Why not share them?" Nowadays, however, any person anywhere on earth can access millions of books for free, on the Internet, thanks to Google and others. So if someone wants to gather thousands of printed books in his house, I have no objection. - Jed
