We’re on the cusp of the fastest deepest most consequential transformation not just of any 1 sector yes but also of civilization. Over the next 10 years we’re going to have a convergence that is going to disrupt the 5 foundational sectors of the economy.
Disruption happens when there is a convergence of technologies. That convergence opens up a new possibility space. 11 years ago Tesla and other companies came into the ev space and solar companies and so on. That’s when the opportunity space opened up.
In 2014 I projected the cost of lithium-ion batteries out to 2030. I’m told that that looked insane: $150 per kWh by 2021 is not going to happen. I was told that 100s of times. Guess what, it ended up being a little conservative, it’s actually below that.
In 2014 I said that by 2020 there would be 300 km electric vehicles that would be cheaper than the median new car in America, which of course at the time sounded insane, not going to happen. Folks were predicting 2040s, 2050s before that would happen. Guess what, it did happen.
Internal combustion engine automobiles are going to be wiped out in the 2020s. 95% of passenger km will be electric by about 2030.
If we start today and we finished by 2030 in America it would cost less than $2t to build a 100% solar wind and battery system. Over 10 years that’s less than 1% of GDP.
Milk is 3% solid proteins. All you need is to disrupt that 3% to disrupt the dairy industry. By 2030 the cost of proteins which are brewed locally will be 80% lower than animal proteins so we expect the dairy industry to be pretty much bankrupt by 2030 and livestock meat will follow.
If we put together 3 disruptions, there are dramatic implications. Because the cost of all of these foundational sectors are going down by up to 10x over the next 10-15 years. The cost of the “American dream” in terms of what we consume for energy, transport, food and so on will be $250 a month. This will give us an opportunity to end poverty, inequality, environmental degradation and so on.
Tag: ubi
Moore’s Law for Everything
what a permanent stimulus could look like, to ease us into UBI:
We should focus on taxing capital rather than labor, and we should use these taxes as an opportunity to directly distribute ownership and wealth to citizens. The best way to improve capitalism is to enable everyone to benefit from it directly as an equity owner. The 2 dominant sources of wealth will be 1) companies, particularly ones that make use of AI, and 2) land, which has a fixed supply.
The amount of wealth available to capitalize the American Equity Fund would be significant. There is about $50t worth of value in US companies alone. This will at least double over the next 10 years.
There is also $30t of privately-held land in the US. Assume that this value will double, too, over the next 10 years. If we increase the tax burden on holding land, its value will diminish relative to other investment assets, which is a good thing for society because it makes a fundamental resource more accessible and encourages investment instead of speculation. The value of companies will diminish in the short-term, too, though they will continue to perform quite well over time.
Under the above set of assumptions (current values, future growth, and the reduction in value from the new tax), 10 years from now each of the 250m adults in America would get about $13k every year. That dividend could be much higher if AI accelerates growth, but even if it’s not, $13k will have much greater purchasing power than it does now because technology will have greatly reduced the cost of goods and services. And that effective purchasing power will go up dramatically every year.
China Slackers
Buy a large thermos bottle, and fill it with either Chinese herbal tea or whiskey, as a desk-side companion. Set a reminder on your phone to drink 8 glasses of water every day, and leave your workstation every 50 minutes to get that water. Start doing 15 minutes of stretches, or planking, in the office pantry. Set the goal of becoming the person who uses the most toilet paper in the company.
These are some of the tips for how to slack off at work provided by Massage Bear. Her philosophy of “touching fish” (mō yú), synonymous with lazing around at work, has resonated with many Chinese, increasingly exhausted by society’s ever more intense rat race.
as China becomes more prosperous, bullshit jobs are growing, just like in other advanced economies. Makes me wonder whether the transition to UBI will happen faster in China if these trends accelerate, as they likely will.
Automation Crisis?
Even if nearly all currently existing jobs will eventually be automated, as we progress toward that point new jobs will continue to be created for humans, preventing the kind of mass unemployment or low wages that might be expected, as long as the market has time to adjust (which isn’t necessarily the case– if the pace of automating jobs were to speed up enough, we could still see a crisis.) However, once machines surpass human capabilities for a low enough price in all jobs, the entire economy will change and something else will take its place. What that is we can’t really say– our economic models break down, and the future becomes even more difficult to predict. Beyond this point, we don’t even know to what extent humans are still guiding the course of civilization, let alone how employment will work.
UBI Plans
most of them fail on basic math – they rely on funding schemes that wouldn’t come close to covering costs. The rest are too small to actually lift people out of poverty. None of them are at all credible. These plans fail even though they cheat and give themselves dictatorial power. “End corporate welfare, then redirect the money to UBI!” But if it was that easy to end corporate welfare, wouldn’t people have done it already, for non-UBI related reasons? “We’ll get a UBI by ending corporate welfare” is an outrageous claim. And even the plans that let themselves make it fail on basic math.
Yang Bid Very 21st Century
In the history of politicking, few politicians have publicly declared what to do about America’s crumbling malls, or how to provide free marriage counseling for all, or how to make filing taxes fun. But Andrew Yang, who’s gunning to be the Democratic presidential candidate in 2020, certainly has—and those are the more minor concerns among a dizzying list of 80 policy positions on his campaign website.
also has geoengineering, UBI and many other things.
UBI Might Hurt Poor
Replacing all current US safety net programs, including those aimed at senior citizens, with a truly universal basic income would result in “a massive distribution up the earnings distribution, along with a redistribution from the elderly and disabled towards those who are neither, primarily but not exclusively those without children.”
SWF+UBD
Matt Bruenig has published an excellent proposal that the United States charter a large sovereign (“social”) wealth fund and use its profits to fund a universal basic dividend. the fund would have to grow to hold something like 64% of all assets, or 80% of US “net worth”, to finance a “full” UBI at a 4% per annum payout rate
UBI vs Basic Jobs
In my ideal system, we would propose some sort of inherently progressive tax at some fixed %, and say that the basic income was “however much that produces, divided by everybody”. That means that as the economy grows, the basic income increases. At the beginning, the basic income might not really be enough to live off of (especially if I got my calculations wrong). As we get more things like robot labor and productivity increases, so does the income. By the time robots are good enough to put lots of people out of work, they’re also good enough that X% of what the rich robot-owning capitalists make is quite a lot, and everybody can be comfortable.
Then various Congresspeople can debate at what point the UBI is large enough that we can eliminate various welfare programs. On the one hand, welfare programs can be sticky, so we might worry they would be overly cautious. On the other hand, many Congresspeople are Republicans, so they probably wouldn’t be.
Technological Unemployment
The argument against: we’ve had increasing technology for centuries now, people have been predicting that technology will put them out of work since the Luddites, and it’s never come true. Instead, 1 of 2 things have happened. Either machines have augmented human workers, allowing them to produce more goods at lower prices, and so expanded industries so dramatically that overall they employ more people. Or displaced workers from one industry have gone into another – stable boys becoming car mechanics, or the like. There are a bunch of well-known theoretical mechanisms that compensate for technological displacement – see Vivarelli for a review.
The argument in favor: look, imagine there’s a perfect android that can do everything humans do (including management) only better. And suppose it costs $10 to buy and $1/hour to operate. Surely every business owner would just buy those androids, and then all humans who wanted to earn more than $1/hour would be totally out of luck. There’s no conceivable way the androids would “augment” human labor and there’s no conceivable way the displaced humans could go into another industry. So at some point we’ve got to start getting technological unemployment.
This is a look at which of those arguments is right. Part I will investigate whether unemployment is getting worse. Part II will investigate whether that is because of technology. Part III will investigate what longer-term trends we should expect.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 