Why are we here?

World Summit on Technological Unemployment

Speaker: Scott Santens

Why are we here?

There is a growing concern around the potential unmitigated effects of our advancing state of technology on humanity.

I want to focus on three things:

1. Tech's effects have been problematic for decades

2. This is because of a core problem

3. We can address that core problem

Universal Basic Income

Is there potentially a root cause to all of these symptoms?

Past, present, and future symptoms of a core problem

What happens when everyone gets $1,000 per month?

How can we fund a basic income?

Have we observed any evidence for basic income?

Puzzle Pieces

• We're already funding about half of it
• Additional revenue options include:
• Elimination of subsidies, deductions, and credits
• Consumption taxes (VAT, sales)
• Financial transaction taxes
• Carbon taxes
• Treating citizens as shareholders like in Alaska (LVT, natural resources, patents)
• Savings through reduced costs (crime, health, etc.)

• Welfare programs like TANF and SNAP no longer need to exist
• Welfare cliffs are eliminated because nothing is lost with work (all earned income after taxes is kept as additional income)
• All type II errors eliminated (false negatives) aka everyone we define as needing help gets it
• All forms of unpaid unrecognized work become paid and recognized (parenting, open source coding, Wikipedia)
• Minimum wages laws become entirely optional as everyone can refuse to work for insufficient wages

• The American Income Maintenance Experiments
• Canada's Mincome in Dauphin, Manitoba
• Universal Basic Income pilots in Namibia and India
• Studies of cash transfer programs all over the world
• GiveDirectly's work in Uganda and Kenya
• Studies of basic income size monthly lottery winners
• Alaska's annual Permanent Fund Dividend

What happens when work is no longer required?

The Great Decoupling

Why did wages and salaries decouple from rising productivity?

Where are we now?

What's been going on?

Where are we headed?

Loss of bargaining power

• Citizenship effects
• More time to engage in political activism
• Greater ability to vote on election days
• More time to volunteer locally
• More time for parenting and other care work
• Less need for patents and copyrights

• Wages and salaries must adjust to attract workers
• Where the required wage becomes too high, technology is welcomed to take the job
• Less fear causing people to work more than 40 hours
• Jobs requiring less than 8 hours of work can adjust
• New ability to outright refuse jobs that need not exist
• Productivity goes up with all of the above

Compensation from work decoupled from productivity over 40 years ago

What happened to unions?

40 years of occupational transformation

U.S. wealth is distributed almost entirely at the top

Introducing the self-driving truck

When will driverless trucks take over the roads?

What kind of support exists for basic income?

What kind of effects have we observed?

Left or Right?

Killing jobs but saving lives

Most estimates point to a window of disruption centered around 2025, but the technology already exists. The roadblock is politics.

In 2012 in the US, 330,000 large trucks were involved in crashes that killed nearly 4,000 people

Globalization and public sentiment

“Whenever California passes its operational regulations. We’re just waiting for that.” - Sarah Hunter, head of policy at GoogleX when asked to predict when fully autonomous vehicles might be roaming American roads

All of this assumes that everyone has enough income to live despite not being in the labor force. How? We make enough a new starting point.

In 6 years of testing, Google's driverless cars have driven more than 2 million miles and been in 16 accidents, all faultless.

"There is then the important issue of security, of protection against risks common to all... Here, however, an important distinction has to be drawn between two conceptions of security: a limited security which can be achieved for all and which is, therefore, no privilege, and absolute security, which in a free society cannot be achieved for all. The first of these is security against severe physical privation, the assurance of a given minimum of sustenance for all; and the second is the assurance of a given standard of life."

• Willem Buiter, chief economist of Citi
• Canadian Medical Association
• Robert Skidelsky, economic historian
• Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed
• Albert Wenger, venture capitalist
• Erik Olin Wright, analytical Marxist
• Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Facebook
• Sex Workers Open University
• Ryan Holmes, CEO of Hootsuite
• /r/BasicIncome on Reddit

• Primary earners spend more time job searching
• New mothers extend their maternity leaves
• Birth weights increase due to maternal nutrition
• Students focus on school, grades improve
• Hospitalization rates decline (8.5%)
• Crime goes down (42%)
• Home ownership rates increase (4-6%)
• More fresh fruits and vegetables consumed
• No increase in alcohol and tobacco (19 studies)
• Savings go up, debts go down
• Entrepreneurs are born and so are customers

Is there another way of increasing bargaining power?

Source: David H. Autor, Journal of Economic Perspectives

-Friedrich Hayek

Effect of this much inequality on economic growth

Incomes by race have continued to be segregated

How we work has been transformed

Men have been slowly earning less since 1973

Driverless trucks are already being deployed

What else is here or right around the corner?

• Deep learning algorithms trained by Big Data
• International master level chess self-taught in 72 hours
• Learned to play Atari 2600 seeing only pixels and points
• Can now caption photographs
• Can outperform humans in IQ tests ( < Master degree)
• Even being applied to self-driving vehicles by Nvidia

CFO of Suncor, after saying self-driving trucks aren’t fantasy and that they’ve been testing them in their oilsands operations since 2013 with the intent of replacing their entire fleet by 2020:

“That will take 800 people off our site. At an average (salary) of $200,000 per person, you can see the savings we’re going to get from an operations perspective.”

• The "Uber/gig/sharing economy" has begun
• 40% of workforce is now contingent labor
• 40 hour weeks have drifted to 47 hours
• More insecurity
• Less productivity
• 8 hour days average 5 hours work... why?

OECD: Had inequality remained as it was in 1990, US GDP would be $1 trillion higher today, and would be even higher if we'd reduced inequality.

"The impact of inequality on growth stems from the gap between the bottom 40% with the rest of society, not just the poorest 10%. Anti-poverty programs will not be enough."

Where might we see it first?

The Entrepreneurial Effect

Left or Right?

"I am now convinced that the simplest approach will prove to be the most effective -- the solution to poverty is to abolish it directly by a now widely discussed measure: the guaranteed income."

• Switzerland voting on it in 2016
• Experiments are beginning in the Netherlands
• Finland has very strong support and will experiment
• Canada is gaining momentum quickly
• Namibia has created a Ministry for Poverty Alleviation headed by Bishop Kameeta of the BIG pilot
• Brazil passed it into law in 2004

In Namibia, when given basic incomes, self-employment jumped 301%.

In Liberia, when given basic incomes, 1/3 of recipients started their own businesses.

In India, when given basic incomes, recipients were 3x as likely to start a business, 2x as likely to increase their working hours as those in control villages, and 1/3 of women started their own businesses.

In Kenya, when poor people were given cash unconditionally, 90% of them used it to start their own businesses or purchase livestock.

What happens when work is no longer required?

The bottom 80% has been receiving less and less of the total pie

Introducing Universal Basic Income

The rise of "bullshit jobs"

Decreased security

What else is right around the corner?

Companies that need less labor

Example: Food Services

• Self-ordering ramp-up
• Hamburger machines
• Robotic chefs

- Martin Luther King, Jr.

We've left behind those under 24, and those over 65 have seen the largest growth in income

The Federal Reserve surveyed 50,000 people in 2014 and found that 47% would not be able to handle an unexpected expense of just $400 without borrowing money or selling something.

More than 45 million needing food assistance since 2011.

“Through some strange alchemy no one can quite explain, the number of salaried paper-pushers ultimately seems to expand, and more and more employees find themselves, not unlike Soviet workers actually, working 40 or even 50 hour weeks on paper, but effectively working 15 hours just as Keynes predicted, since the rest of their time is spent organizing or attending motivational seminars, updating their Facebook profiles or downloading TV box-sets.” - David Graeber

Tesla

Ford

Give individuals the ability to decline jobs entirely

• The Uber economy of on-demand work becomes a tool of empowerment offering greater control of hours
• Increased ability for people to pursue their own work
• Education becomes more voluntarily self-pursued, meaning less pressure on tuition costs, and greater uptake of alternatives like MOOCs
• Psychologically, commitment to tasks is increased

No matter what, every individual gets the same amount as everyone else as an equal income floor set above the poverty level.

In the U.S. this would be at least $1,000 per month, and by definition it could eliminate poverty, but that is only one effect.

It's enough for anyone to refuse work which is both its greatest strength and the cause of most concern.

Falling Prices?

The most common job in each state in 2014

Decreased democracy

Companies that need no labor

individual bargaining power vs. collective bargaining power

Not Left or Right but Forward

Is it all positive? What are some negative effects?

Universal Basic Income as the New New Deal Coalition

China reported its first unmanned factory as part of "robot replace human" program.

Collective bargaining power has been falling since the 1950s

For the past 10 years, some costs have soared while others have plummeted.

Note: Food and housing are the two costs that have seen the least change.

So what do we do?

Eye of the beholder

3.5 million drivers

($40,000/yr avg)

5.2 million related

? million dependent

• Went from 650 workers to 60 workers
• Defect rate went from 25% to <5%
• Production went from 8,000 to 21,000

Citizens with an annual household income greater than $100,000 are 80% likely to vote, while those with an income of $15,000 or less are only 30% likely to vote. (Nonprofit Vote, 2013)

“When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.” (Gilens and Page, 2014)

No more need for 300+ programs

Simplify the tax code

Can eliminate federal minimum wage

Fewer government employees

Sydney has world's first fully automated port terminal

Support from the Right:

Support from the Left:

In a time when we can agree on nothing, basic income holds the potential to be an idea that can gather support from across the entire political spectrum and bring people together at the same table.

It is not the only change we need to make, but it's the change that will have the widest range of emergent effects.

• Less fuel use, lower costs, no injuries

• Moneylenders worse off due to reduced need (recipients twice as likely to reduce debts)
• Shift from wage labor to self-employment made it harder for employers to find employees
• Reduced dependency of women on men for their survival

Source: NPR

Elimination of poverty

Reduced inequality

No more holes in safety net

Universal strike fund

Technology has been making things worse instead of better for decades, and we ain't seen nothing yet. It's also not tech's fault. It's ours.

We have stubbornly refused to fix the primary flaw in our system - that not working isn't really an option, so no one has any real bargaining power outside of unions, and no one has any consumer buying power outside of employment.

By introducing a universal basic income, we can correct that flaw, and consequently welcome technology to work for us instead of against us, freeing us all to seek purpose over survival, and abundance over scarcity.