I mostly agree with you, but organizing a bunch of stories that mention certain keywords is innovative and useful. And there is a big problem with the way the current system works: Meltwater is supposed to go negotiate some deal with the AP, even when providing content to clients who are themselves licensed to access the AP content. I think you'd see much more indie content of the mash-up variety if there were an efficient way to handle the licensing.
A basic income guarantee is a far more important idea than free higher education or affordable housing. The argument for universal healthcare is that we're going to take care of the sick whether they purchased insurance or not. What argument do you have that the market is not a good mechanism for allocating funds to housing? Or education? I guess an argument can be made for subsidizing education on the grounds that an educated populace is good for society, but making it free doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Yes, I don't think I phrased it well, but I didn't intend to assume that there is a single Robot Mega Corp.
> The more humans we replace by robots, the lower the cost of goods will be
Most physical goods have two parts: materials and labor. Even if robots were to bring the labor cost to approximately zero, we still have the material cost. So you're right that you don't necessarily have to own the robots to successful, but you do have to own resources.
You're looking at things from the viewpoint of society. There your argument makes sense -- of course "people" will continue to work. But that argument, that we'll just continue to work on things higher up Maslow's hierarchy, doesn't hold for individuals who don't hold an ownership stake in these technological advances. Robot Mega Corp and it's owners have no need for your grandmother's scarf, so what is she going to provide in trade for her more basic needs? Not having a job could be a real problem for her.
Incidentally, minimums, where earnings less than $X are increased to $X, are terrible and break incentives near the minimum. Much better are base incomes, guaranteed uniformly to even the wealthy.
I don't like this explanation at all. This fuzzy thinking works out because you knew it to work out based on your much less fuzzy understanding of the complex numbers. Similarly fuzzy thinking in a new problem domain won't work out 90% of the time.
When I worked in retail, our boss would have us send our friends across the street to our competitor's store to really screw with their employees. The theory was that this would make them less courteous to their real customers, which would send more of them our way. He always made a big deal about how courteous we were. This went on for over a year when one day we started noticing very similar "troll" customers appearing in our store and screwing with us. I'm sure you can guess what I'm going to say next: Hahaha! None of this story was true.
This isn't really something we can try, but I suspect you'd get turned down some reasonable percentage of the time (2%-10%, say) with such an offer, by people who have "all the money they need." Since to me the utility of the first few million is vastly larger than the last 500 million, I'd offer 50% just to avoid that rare case.
Reading the summary you've linked to, isn't the implication for this thread that certain puzzle type questions, if they do a reasonable job of measuring general intelligence, are useful predictors of job performance? (With the big caveat that in the US they are potentially illegal.)
The popular response here of "I'm never going to solve these puzzles in my day to day" seems to wholly miss the point.
I almost wrote "uniform", but that seemed simplistic since it didn't take into account factors like age, number of children, etc. But if the majority of the wealth goes to the few owners of the machines, then the economy certainly doesn't have the property I'm talking about.
Whether or not the term "meritocracy" is thrown around as propaganda is a separate issue from whether or not we should want to live in a meritocracy, which is what the article was about. In fact, most people don't want to live a pure meritocracy, as that would for example preclude the freedom to give gifts to others (as gifts are by definition unearned).
I think one property that our economy ought have as we head into a future of machines increasingly displacing human workers is this: If all human work in the economy stopped, wealth should converge to an approximately fair distribution, preferably within a small number of lifetimes.
b) Parents are able to spend money on their children.
I've spoken with many people who are in favor of both a) and b) and don't see the cognitive dissonance, but from this:
> like expensive tutoring aimed towards helping them pass exams, which is not available to many.
I guess you really favor a) over b). Unless your point was that exams should be selected to minimize the influence of last minute cram efforts which disproportionally benefit those with expensive tutors, in which case I might agree with you.
This is mostly right. This is certainly not about the boycotters believing all information (or even all academic publications) should be free, as the other branch of rayiner's thread assumes. And if Elsevier was more reasonable in their rates, this issue might never have come up or gained momentum.
However, as academics look around and see that the costs of publishing and hosting have become negligible compared to the value of their volunteer contributions, most of them feel that their own works should be freely available online or even that other academics ought to make their works freely available in accordance with culture of academia.
This is perfectly reasonable (of course it is -- look at the people involved) and I agree with you that rayiner is off the mark on this one.