The number of adults who are “not in the labor force” (NILF) surged to an all-time high in June to 105.8 million, according to figures from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

With AI becoming increasingly integrated into “white-collar” industries, raising fears of mass job cuts, there have been calls to bring in a so-called universal basic income, or UBI — which pays people for merely existing.

However, Eberstadt warns that this would only worsen the number of dropouts in American society.

“Disruptive technologies in the past have been really great for people who have had skills,” he said. “Their productivity and incomes have gone up a lot.

“They’ve also displaced a lot of labor for people who don’t have skills. It looks like we’re going to be on that same track with AI, wherever it goes in the next 18 months or 10 years,” Eberstadt said.

“When Henry Ford came down the road, I don’t think that anybody had any idea what a combustion engine was going to do in mass-produced cars,” he said.

"But I would not like to see a guaranteed income, a UBI. Because I look at how men who are neither working nor looking for work say that they are spending their days now. And it is very depressing to see what they say they are doing. And I wouldn’t like us to be buying more of that,” he said.

“They are not engaged in civil society, not helping out around the house, not getting out of the house. Spending 2,000 hours a year in front of a screen. That’s a great warm-up act for becoming a statistic in deaths of despair,” he said.

This is basically a third of our population

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    3·
    3 days ago

    “Disruptive technologies in the past have been really great for people who have had skills,” he said. “Their productivity and incomes have gone up a lot.

    Ehh.

    I mean, I do think that people tend to underestimate their ability to adapt using their existing skillset. And it’s certainly the case that if you know, say, statistics, to grab one skill, there are a wide range of fields where you might use that knowledge.

    But you can clearly also find examples where that’s not the case, where a skillset wasn’t very easy to repurpose.

    When the horse was phased out as a means of transport, a lot of people had a skillset around dealing with horses, and as demand for horse-related work declined, people need to switch careers, and some of that skillset isn’t going to be terribly transferrable. And because there were many jobs with that skillset that were phased out at one time, there will have been a glut of people on the market with that skillset all looking for new jobs. Not much call for even more expertise in dealing with horses when the existing few slots are already allocated to people who really know their stuff.

    That said, it might be that there can be interesting perks for society as a whole, even if it’s not great for the people who are unemployed. I do remember being frustrated a while back as to why there were so few good technically-sophisticated late Cold War milsim games out of the West. Most of the good stuff came out of ex-Warsaw Pact states. I went digging. Finally found some discussion on it. Basically, when the Cold War ended, Soviet defense spending dropped precipitously. That meant that you had a lot of people with a lot of knowledge about military hardware looking for work (this is also, incidentally, why the US purchased Russian space launch services for some time, to subsidize the industry, because the US didn’t want a lot of unemployed people with a skillset in doing things like making ballistic missiles running around on the global job market). But, anyhow, a lot of military simulator video game developers were able to hire really outstanding ex-Warsaw-Pact defense people as consultants for a while, who really knew their stuff. That’s a rare situation. I doubt that we’ll ever have a period with that level of quality milsim video games again, not short of another breakup of a huge military power. :-/

    • Sunflier@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      The phasing out of using horses drastically limited the need for horse riders, but it basically killed off horses. Beyond derbies and some shows, they’re nowhere. But, where we have no social net and will be left to starve and die in a ditch, at least the now surplus horses were put out of their misery.

      • AngryCommieKender@lemmy.world
        1·
        3 days ago

        But, where we have no social net and will be left to starve and die in a ditch, at least the now surplus horses were put out of their misery.

        Not in a lot of places. The farms went under, and the horses were let loose. Eastern Kentucky has a real problem with wild horses maiming themselves