In capitalism, the purpose of a business is to maximise profit. 

A business may have other purposes (e.g being indefinitely sustainable, having a positive effect on human life, improving soil fertility) but secondary purposes do not exist without the primary purpose of profit maximisation.

Despite the simplicity of the single dollar metric defining profit, there are multitudes of variables that affect it. The state of the economy, access to consumers, legislation, geography, advertising, business longevity, debt, credit, competition, innovation, access to technology, supply chain, rent, and expenses such as paying employees – all these factors, and many others, impact a business's profit. 

Because almost all businesses use humans acting as decision makers, often profit maximisation is far from optimal. Businesses that may not have access to large-scale data analysis must make decisions based on limited data. These decisions are vulnerable to human error. This can and does compromise profit.

A common and much discussed form of human error arises in cost minimisation. Specifically in the cost of employee wages, simplistic cost-minimisation logic may be used: 

1. I want my profit maximised.
2. I need to minimise costs. 
3. I will pay employees minimum wage. 
4. This will avoid money being wasted by paying employees more than the necessary amount to get them to work. 

The appeal of this logic is its simplicity. But by focussing on money paid to employees, it ignores other directly relevant variables such as the financial benefits of employee retention, recruitment costs, training costs, and the cornicopia of brand and indirect revenue benefits of having loyal, long-term, passionate, happy staff who want to work and who will go above and beyond their resposibilities to ensure the business succeeds. 

The parable below illustrates the variable of employee wages in a comparison between two small business owners; one who focusses on wage cost minimisation, and another who welcomes the complex value generated by well paid employees. 

Thanks for learning!
Michael 

The content below this line has been published with permission from contributing author Richard Neate 

​Mike and Lisa are opening identical restaurants in Smalltown. They will have the only two restaurants in town.
 
Both have 30 tables. Both need 12 staff. Both serve similar food, of similar quality for the same prices.  The only difference is:

​Both restaurants are in the high street of Smalltown, and both are the same size. Therefore, their property costs are identical.  Ingredients and décor must match their place in the market, so their costs are identical, except for wages:

​On average, 40 groups of people go out for dinner in Smalltown.  Therefore, during their first few weeks they both average 20 covers each. BUT.....

​Both restaurants have been trading for 3 months now.  If we look at the scores, we see that Mike is winning at the moment – in monetary terms at least.  But Lisa is happier and works fewer hours.
 
But now the restaurants are starting to build their reputations.  Lisa’s staff are happier, they care more about the business, and this all means that they are better with the customers.

​On average, 40 groups of people still go out for dinner in Smalltown.  But now Lisa is getting better reviews and building more customer loyalty:

​On average, 40 groups of people still go out for dinner in Smalltown.  But now Lisa is getting better reviews even in National and international websites and has a big and loyal customer base because her staff do such a good job of looking after them:

The DORVA Scale of Emotional Response Scoring is a system for self-reported emotional response measurement that generates fast, reliable, and consistent quantitative data on your emotional responses to stimuli.

Let's start by taking a look at the scale itself. ​

• The DORVA scale is intended to be a simple, fast, and affordable means of producing self-reported data to measure the positivity or negativity of a human subject's emotional experience in reaction to external stimuli. It's terrific for self-examination, but also suitable for documenting the emotional experiences of study participants (including your study of yourself, if you like spreadsheets!). 
  
  
• While self-reported DORVA data has the benefit of being self-descriptive (i.e. a value of “repulsion” is as simple as recognising your own reflexive facial movements, unlike the results of repulsion as returned by brain scanning feedback imagery), DORVA isn't recommended as a substitute for other data production means like EEG feedback, fMRI scanning, and other emotion self-reporting models. ​Data should be obtained from all available sources. 

You'll notice the chart doesn't list the full spectrum of human emotions.

​That would be a big chart! Especially considering emotions can and routinely do occur in complex combinations; not just one at a time!

What the chart offers is a spectrum of emotional intensity to help record emotions based on their perceived severity in the moment in which they are experienced. For this reason, documenting emotions when they are felt is crucial: memory, even immediate-short-term memory, introduces too much of an error margin due to our propensity to compare how we felt about a topic to how we felt about another topic using pseudo-logic: "I was distraught when my puppy was killed yesterday, but I must have felt more distraught when my parent died years ago, so I will rank my emotions relative to each other." When in reality there is no reason that such grief for both events shouldn't have registered at a -5 (abominable) in emotional intensity for both events, for example. 

Data recorded using the DORVA model doesn't cater to memory-alterations made in this way. 

The name of the model, DORVA, is just an acronym for the 5 scores on the negative side of the scale. When self-evaluating, remembering the name can make recollection of the measurement chart a little easier when experiencing intense negative emotions. 

The emotions listed in the chart and their defining characteristics are a usage guide only. Grief, for example, could be felt at an intensity score of -4 (Vile) without any desire to punish or cause suffering. Sincere joy could be felt at an intensity score of 3 (Joyful) without any sensation of warmth. Individuals feel emotions differently, have different physiological predispositions to causative hormones like dopamine and cortisol, and are capable of complex emotion combinations. When recording DORVA data, getting each datum exactly "right" according to the description in the chart not as valuable as logging your data as close to the time it's experienced as possible with your honest evaluation of your emotion.

This is not a perfect tool for measuring emotions. But generating any data set of emotional experience, even with an unknown error margin, is going to provide more valuable insight than undocumented observational, memory-based reflection of emotional experiences. That's the whole point of the DORVA scale! To give you a readily accessible quantitative look without any more sophisticated equipment than notebook or spreadsheet.

Next, let's talk about how you can use it. 

Draw a chart with these columns entitled: Date, Time, Location, Event description, and DORVA response. 
​
If you have a smartphone with Google Spreadsheets on it, you can use that. Otherwise a notebook you carry often would be suitable. Here's a template.

Record your data however you wish. Some recommended methods for producing data are below. 

Baseline data: Every day when you wake up (and/or before going to bed) record a DORVA entry. This will show your emotional baseline when you start the day. It can be useful to compare this to how you end the day! (See Using your data below)

Event data: Every time you feel a strong emotion, and successfully remember to record it, and make the choice to record it... make a DORVA entry. This is a powerful way to see the range of your emotional intensity. It can also indicate a possible positive or negative bias. ​

Each month or frequency of your choice, review your data representing key parts of your emotional experience. Below are some recommended considerations for analysing your data to produce useful and actionable insights. 

Produce an average on what your general baseline emotional state is. How do I feel about this? Do I want to improve it?

​Review baseline data
Recording your baseline is a key way to see how your emotions have changed over time. If you make an entry every day for years, you may notice a difference or no change at all. But even over a period of a few weeks you can spot differences. What has changed in your life that could explain these? What other changes could you make that could get you waking up happy every day? 

If you record your waking and bedtime emotional state most days, you will be able to compare these trends. Is either or both changing, or are they static over time? Are they the same emotional state?

​Do you generally end the day on a more positive or negative emotional point than you began it? Why might this be the case? Is there a standout recurring difference on a particular day of the week, or between work days and days off? 

What days have you had the happiest wake-up and bedtime? What days were the worst? What can you do differently to wake up and go to sleep feeling consistently contented and happy? 

Review event data

Do you have records of major emotional events multiple times a day? Do you have them only some days or seldom? Are they in some places or anywhere? 

Do you consider yourself an optimist, a pessimist, neither, or both? Which would you rather be?

Does the data show you have more strong negative emotional reactions than positive ones throughout a typical day? 

Think about changes you might like to make to your outlook, if any. How will you achieve those? 

Do you consider yourself a particularly emotional person? Does the frequency or intensity of emotionally significant events meet your expectations or surprise you? In what ways? 

What significant positive events happen regularly in your life. Who are they with? Where do they happen? How might you create more of this positivity?

Do any significant negative events happen regularly in your life? What can I do to change the cause? Do you also want to change your emotional response to that cause? How will you do that?

As you can see from this exercise, these questions are very inward focussed. They are excellent questions to reflect on your life and choices at any time. The advantage of involving DORVA in the mix is that you no longer need to rely on a vague amalgamated feeling built up over time, or specific memories (reconstructions) of individual events and how you think you felt at the time. You can rely on the data which is a reflection of the actual intensity that you honestly felt at that time, and make a more informed evaluation of your emotional experience that will better inform any changes to your life that you want to make. 

And you can completely trust the data source, because it is an honest reflection of your emotional journey and forms part of the record of your life. Now that's something to feel good about. :)

Thanks for learning! 
Michael 

We say things like this too:

"Bottom feeder." “That’s low.” “Downtrodden.” “You have to learn to crawl before you walk.” and even the term “To put someone down.” “To fall from grace.” “To be taken down a peg.” “To be laid low.” “Scraping the bottom of the barrel.” “To be “tread on” or “stepped over”. And of course depictions abound of Hell as subterranean, “down there”, below our feet, ever presently waiting for us to fail and fall. “It’s all downhill from here,” indicates a “descent” into an inferior circumstance, even despite the considerable biophysical realities of moving downhill consuming less energy than moving uphill.

There are many situations where elevation is not good – or downright dangerous. The fear of heights is one common example. The actual danger of heights is another. Yet humans can also have a rush of adrenaline and dopamine in response to such danger – a physical acrocentric response!

1. A bill is written and a case is made defining the expected benefits to society of the proposed law change, including specific metrics for measuring efficacy. Current data defining the problem the bill intends to fix is also provided. This is put before the law approvers to implement or reject.
2. The bill is passed and becomes law for a provisional period determined by the approvers.
3. The law change is communicated to the populace.
4. Data is accumulated using the stated metrics for the provisional period.
5. At the end of the provisional period the law is evaluated by the approvers. Did it measurably improve society in the manner expected, or did it make it worse?
6. The law is moved from provisional to permanent status, or is removed.
7. The result and the data on which it is based are communicated to the populace.

This post is to thank Concept Frontier readers for coming to my website and learning what I have to offer. Here are 30 new ideas for you to do whatever you want with.

1. A phone-compatible pressure sensor that reads blood circulation to your legs and tells you when you've been sitting still for too long.
    
2. Memory-fibre shoelaces that always sit perfectly once tied.
    
3. A smoke detector synced with a thermal camera to record data in an emergency.
    
4. A company that pays all employees the same salary of $75,000 per year; reflecting the Princeton study that revealed happiness correlates with income only up to that amount.
    
5. A notepad app that let's you find a citation on Google Scholar in-app and formats it automatically.
    
6. A chat app widget that provides communication data for the people you chat with, that clearly shows you the times and days of the week they're most responsive.
    
7. A workout record that examines your gains over time and projects future curves and recommended routines and timings.
    
8. An analogue-dial belt buckle that you can adjust by the millimeter. Keeps your belly comfortable no matter how big your lunch was.
   
   
9. A city initiative with kiosks allowing the public to trade illegal narcotics in their possession for the same weight in noopept, racetams, or other over-the-counter smart drugs, no questions asked.
    
10. An auto-retracting headphone cable. Like a tape measure.
     
11. Vending machine on a bus.
     
12. A sturdier office chair with an incline sit-ups mode.
     
13. Electronic pen attachment that gives you data about how you write: pressure, legibility, letter consistency, writing speed, and amount written per session.
     
14. Modular cologne set enabling users to easily customise themselves a complex, unique library of scents.
     
15. An electronic fabric tape measure that sends your measurements to an app. The app matches your measurements to sizes of clothes you browse online, and tells you what sizes and items will fit, without you ever having to think about it.
     
    Also! a carpenter's tape measure that sends measurements to an app that records the dimensions of materials in your project. The app uses that data to create a model of the project to more reliably confirm your timber lengths before you cut.
     
16. A medical history app allowing you to easily share relevant parts of your medical history with other users. Makes hooking up safer.
     
17. Subscription service weekly pizza deliveries, am I right?
     
18. One tap camera and video apps: you point your phone, tap the app icon, and boom you're recording.
     
19. An EMF reading device that detects and notifies you when cameras and microphones are active in the vicinity. (So you can stand up straight and look good even in paparazzi pictures!)
     
20. Sensors on door and window thresholds that log data on bugs entering in and out.
     
21. A heart rate app that measures your heart rate fluctuations during your date to let you know exactly how hard you fell.
     
22. Legislation allowing complex placebos to be sold as supplements, offering claims of non-medical health benefits.
     
23. An app with optical recognition that can isolate a person's outfit into garments from a photo, recognises patterns and colours, and offers style suggestions based on pre-programmed style rules.
     
    Bonus feature: the user can configure their own style rules, and specify colours, tones, and patterns they like.
     
24. A drone-mounted water blaster for cleaning your roof without falling off the ladder.
     
25. A study exploring the correlative and causative effect of housing density on urban sprawl, traffic congestion, and pollution per capita.
    (I'm going to do this one, so let me know if you start and I'll help your project instead of duplicating it - Michael)
     
26. Long-range metal detector, capable of identifying concealed items from a distance.
     
27. An English lexicon of new terms specifically for describing scents.
     
28. An experiment showing the neurological effects of changing language to take responsibility for ones own state. Instead of "you made me feel," replaced with "the way I feel about that is."
     
29. An app that lets you take a photo of a leaf, fruit, bud, or bark of a tree and tells you what tree that is. (This idea by Helena P)
     
    
30. Browser plugin that presents every news article side by side with an article from the source with the opposite bias. (This idea also by Helena P)

 
Bonus idea!

A thought-prompt generator app and website. Hit a button, get something to think about. If it's not interesting, hit it again.

Humans have a lot of defects. The Blame Reflex, and our innate "Us vs Them” pathology are two big ones. 

Our defects lead us to behaviours that aren't in civilisation's best interest, or even our own best interest. No single human's behaviour has been, or ever will be perfect. Every one of us behaves badly sometimes, as you might have noticed. 

Yet civilisation is improving. How is this possible?

Here's one explanation.

If you applied these 2 attributes – 'Good for the individual human', and 'Good for civilisation' – to all human behaviours in a big list, you'd wind up with four types of behaviour: 

1. Bad for everybody (B)
2. Good for the individual, bad for civilisation (GI)
3. Good for civilisation, bad for the individual (GC)
4. Good for everybody (G)

Bad for everybody (B) and Good for everybody (G) are easy. We all agree behaviours that are good for everyone should be maximised, and behaviours that are bad for everyone should be eliminated. That’s a consensus, and a fundamental factor in civilisation’s improvement. But it’s not the only factor. ​

Today Harvard Business Review (publishers of all manner of goodies at hbr.org) emailed me some sales material with the hardest-hitting subject line in the history of sales email subject lines. It was a thing of strangely cohesive abstract beauty, like Frankenstein's monster would be had he been sewn together from various and sundry chunks of Disney Princesses rather than local cadavers.

Here is Harvard Business Review's incredible email subject line:

That subject line is a rich vein of psychological sales gold. I counted 10 distinct psychological principles utilised in it. Maybe you can spot even more. Here are mine:

1. Get (a verb that triggers the "what's in it for me" mentality from the outset)
   
2. 7 (research shows people click numbered lists, as BuzzFeed will tell you)
   
3. Free (English language's most effective buzz word)
   
4. Gifts (another way of saying and reinforcing free, uses the power of repetition to sell)
   
5. When (not if or should, but when to indicate certitude)
   
6. You (personal pronoun, this is conversational language)
   
7. Subscribe (your call to action power verb)
   
8. and Save (second most effective buzz word)
   
9. Up to 80% (a statistic, triggering a sense of measured credibility)
   
10. (Bonus psychological principle: Jaden Smith Style First Letter Capitalisation Catches The Eye Like A News Headline!)
    

This is email list marketing at it's most thoroughly researched and deviously influential. I am richer for the experience.

If you'd like to learn more about how human psychological principles are veritably milked for their applications in clickbait, here's a clever one from Wired.com:

You’ll Be Outraged at How Easy It Was to Get You to Click on This Headline

Thanks for learning!
Michael

The existential fear of Artifical Intelligence, as defined by Elon Musk, Stephen Hawking, and their peers, and published on FutureOfLife.org has merit. It's a "large scale existential risk". Read it. Sign it if you share these distinctly Asimovian concerns. They boil down the topic AI perfectly: "Our AI systems must do what we want them to do."

But what about the fear of job automation? The fear of "technological unemployment"?

No, that one is not a matter of existential risk. That's a matter of personal job security, DEFINITELY. Which is a problem in itself, but of a drastically lesser magnitude. The effects of large scale technological unemployment on an economy, however, is merely a catalyst for a very simple and (from a humanitarian viewpoint very overdue) change to capitalism.

It's a matter of existential change.

Maybe it feels like a big threat, after the sustained mass media onslaught we continue to endure. The fact that automation is by its nature an agent of change makes it irresistible for panic-mongers. There's even some overlap between the topics of AI and job automation: Artificial Intelligence precursor software already is a portion of the technology humans use to automate work.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that job technological unemployment is neither inherently good nor inherently bad.

This article substantiates this above claim. Point by point, we'll address every assumption fundamental to the fear of automation and technological unemployment as a "large scale existential risk".

We'll start with a quick understanding of the labor market.

The range of tasks that humans can do as work is as broad as the imagination. But all those tasks fit into two categories: Manual labor and Knowledge work.

A "job" is a set of tasks, of which some are manual and tasks that are knowledge work. The ratio determines if the job is "manual labor" or "knowledge work" but in fact all jobs contain both to some extent. Even jobs that are reliant on the use of expert knowledge still invariably require the movement of matter. Consider what a surgeon does with a scalpel, or an architect with a stylus, or a developer with a keyboard. Conversely, all manual labor requires the interpretation of instructions to action, and the ability to communicate; both by definition are knowledge work tasks.

So now we have a clear understanding of tasks, jobs, manual labor, and knowledge work. No doubt you can relate that to your own situation.

Losing a job you wanted to keep is a problem, no matter how it happens.

Whether all your tasks are more cheaply automated, or you're fired by some hostile, it can be a major problem for the worker.

But a worker losing a job isn't a problem for society as a whole. No matter how certain you are of it. If you're interested understanding the impact to society of the inevitable automation of all work -- and therefore all jobs -- you've come to the right place. We'll analyze every argument espousing automation as a social menace, and you'll also learn about a quantitative solution proposal for improving our primary means of resource allocation in a major contemporary economy, from being "work-based" to a measurably better model. The mathematics prove the financial viability of the solution using current federal data. It's open for discussion.

Assumptions derived from feelings are a poor substitute for a data-based world view. These assumptions don't stand a chance.

Let's get into it!

This attitude is short sighted. If it were true, technological unemployment would be Capitalist Armageddon brought on by the Four Horserobots of the Apocalypse.

Fortunately, the assumption is false.

It's also illogical and dangerous.

The assumption "work is the ONLY way to make income" is an example of taking a DESCRIPTIVE view of the world — in this case, describing that working in exchange for monetary remuneration is for many people the MOST AVAILABLE and sometimes the ONLY way to accrue money — and turning that description into a PRESCRIPTIVE view of a world in which the assumer believes everyone should live that way no matter what. It's an act of observing a situation and then trying to push that situation on everyone else without bothering to ask one crucial question: "is there a better situation?"

Or perhaps the logic is that since the assumer can't think of a better way, then the situation they're in must be the best one possible: "If I'm in this situation, everyone else should be too. I don't even care if there's a better way. We should do it my way because if other people have a better system but I got this worse system, well... THAT'S NOT FAIR ON ME. So we should all get my system so that everyone gets the same deal and that's fair on everyone. And everyone's experience should be consistent with MY experience because I'm already part way through having it and to change my system would be unfair on me."

Despite the obvious logic errors, this assumption stands against any improvement to the system. When a better system becomes available, owners of this assumption fight against it because they value "others not having more than I have" over "people who have the least having more than they do now".

Human work in exchange for resources is our current model in most of the world. That's a description of the situation. I just described it. This system of resource allocation is often called "Capitalism," and there is a lot of evidence suggesting it to be the best resource sharing system yet trialed in a human society for the purpose of resource allocation. Despite that possibility, the system is profoundly flawed, requires strict democratic influence to regulate, and has failed continuously to set a precedent in which all members of a society run on that system have enough resources on which to live. We have more than enough efficacy data from Capitalism in situ to know unequivocally that it is inadequate.

So if our best model is inadequate, what then? We'll modify it. Henceforth we'll refer to the system as "Hostile Capitalism" since it allows for humans to suffer and die for no other reason than having limited access to the resources they need (which is the bad part), while allowing corporations and individuals to profit in proportion to their work (which is good).

When automation makes human labor increasingly obsolete, there will be an increasing proportion of humans who are unable to accrue adequate resources on which to live if Hostile Capitalism is in effect. Logic tells us the system needs to be modified to ensure that inevitable change to civilisation is not calamitous. To be clear, we are talking about the poorest of us having a shot at survival. If you think "The percentage of humans with adequate access to survival-enabling resources" is NOT the primary metric of civilisation, then get back in your toilet. If you think that percentage is the primary qualitative measure of civilisation, or don't know and want more information before forming an opinion, read on for a quick tangent on Income Inequality.

Automation is therefore harshly and fundamentally at odds with our current capitalism model in which human labor is the primary way humans gain their living resources.

At first glance, it appears automation is set to screw up human resource allocation! Automation and capitalism appear to be in conflict.

Fighting automation is not the answer. That battle can never even be waged, let alone won. Stasis can never beat adaptiveness.

Nor should it, since resource allocation among humans need not FULLY depend on human labor. It can in part. Or not at all, as in the ancient-to-modern use case shared by beggars and monarchs.

Resources can be allocated among humans in other ways.

The automation of labor leads to both greater VOLUME of resources (compare yield of a $300,000 of crop harvester to the yield of $300,000 worth of human labor) but also greater VARIETY of resources (compare clothing availability in the period before the washing machine was invented, vs the period after washing machines became household appliances).

You can deduce from those effects that automation has on resources that automation makes the world better for humans to live in.

Fighting capitalism is not the answer either. For there can never be a consensus on the fair distribution of ALL resources. There is no precedent in human history. The "trickle down" of wealth demonstrably doesn't work.

Adapting capitalism is the answer. Remember, all that's needed is a minimum redistribution of resources that enable the survival of everyone. Not a redistribution of ALL resources like in some miserable socialist communist wasteland.

No. A portion of all resources -- like that accumulated in any democracy's tax system -- CAN be allocated fairly, and without altering the fundamental tenets of capitalism. Concepts like Universal Basic Income only require a portion of society's wealth to be implemented. In so doing, all humans gain sufficient resources on which to subsist, thus freeing them from their DEPENDENCE on labour to live.
The cost of this is increased taxation: a trivial price to pay to ensure that all children eat. But what portion is needed? That's a good problem to solve, and none but the most selfish mind would argue against it after seeing the viability of its mathematics. Which are as follows:

Here we see US Basic Income as a means to meet basic human needs is mathematically and financially viable right now in the year 2016.

Poverty can be eliminated from the USA at the cost of reallocating 40.39% of the nation's GDP. Today.

(You'll note the credibility of the data sources used in this exercise: World Bank. CIA World Factbook. US Federal Reserve. US Federal Census. All of it less than 1 year old. If you have better data, send it in and let's refactor. Maybe it will deviate from 40.39% as high as 41%! But if you want to verify these data sources, they're listed in the article's footer.)

So 40.39% of GDP reallocated to save the impoverished. We'll call this system "Benign Capitalism", because it does not allow humans to suffer and die for their lack of resources (which is good), while allowing corporations and individuals to generally profit in proportion to their work (also good).

In order to transition from "Hostile Capitalism" to "Benign Capitalism" nothing more than a taxation increase to 40% is needed to preserve Americans' quality of life. To achieve this any tax model can be used, as decided by elected officials chosen by the voting public.

The above equation is mathematical proof of the viability of Universal Basic Income as a means of ensuring every American adult's base needs are met.

But what effect would this have on automation?

The effect would be that the owners of companies would continue to profit. Demand for their products would remain generally unchanged, as the very core of capitalism remains unaltered. That 40% of the US's money isn't leaving the economy, it's just moving through a different channel -- one which by its nature guarantees most of it will continue to move, and not wind up sitting static in billionaires' personal surplus. Some producers would see greater profits as a result of there now being more consumers with money to spend in the market. Other producers would see profit diminish, as the higher taxation of their customers affected their ability to spend. The market would do what it always does: balance. And capitalism would continue -- this time with the sustained participation of ALL individuals in the society.

Automation, therefore, would continue. Businesses would be just as compelled to find cheaper automated solutions to labor needed in their production processes than human labor can offer. And humans would continue to work as and when they saw fit. More importantly, workers would find work they enjoyed, and feel less pressured to do work they dislike due to their basic income freeing them from the need to do work they dislike in order to live -- as is the reality for some of the humans in your community as you read these words.

This assumption is a grim one. It assumes that the work we, as individuals, might consider unenjoyable – like cleaning sewers, rubbish collection, or janitorial work – is so offensive to EVERY human that they all would rather it not be done than do it themselves.

In a resource allocation system like UBI where all humans receive enough money to live on, there will always be those who want more money than the minimum. Perhaps a minority, perhaps a majority. Or perhaps everyone, since humans are innately driven to fulfill their many and various desires. But just as human nature still applies, so too do the fundamental rules of capitalism. There is still manual human labor to be done. There are still jobs to do it that pay money. And there will therefore be humans willing to do the work.

It might be that the work for work broadly considered distasteful would pay more than it did in the Hostile Captialism system; in Benign Capitalism human labor has become a more valuable commodity, now that all humans are free to value their own time in the market without being forced to undervalue it in order to stave off death. Sewer-scraping, therefore, costs more money.

Humans will work for additional resources wherever they value the additional income over a portion of their free time. The labor market persists.

And so too does the onward march of exponential automation.

What jobs do you think will be automated foremost? The ones that fewer people want to do, which therefore cost more to employ humans to do, which therefore yield greater savings to the company buying the automation? Seems likely.

Again, let's reiterate: THE RULES OF CAPITALISM HAVEN'T GONE AWAY. Some humans will value their own labor higher than the market does, and get less work as a result. Some will sell their labor more cheaply and get more work. The market will balance, and the work will still get done. Capitalism.

With human labor more expensive overall in Benign Capitalism than in Hostile Captialism, automation will become even more highly sought. Automation itself becomes more valuable.

Consider an hour of the cheapest human labor costing $9, in Hostile Capitalism. Automating that labor to reduce the cost to $1 per hour is a saving of $8 per hour -- at the cost of the human worker who is now in major financial trouble.

Imagine in Benign Capitalism that same hour of human labor now costs $15, because nobody wants to do it too cheaply, and nobody NEEDS to do it that cheaply in order to feed their kids. Automating the same task in the same way to cost $1 per hour is now a saving of $14h -- still at the cost of the human worker, but who faces no major financial trouble.

The comparison shows that while human labor is a now more valuable commodity in Benign Capitalism than Hostile Capitalism, automation is now more valuable as well. Therefore, more automation is required for businesses to maintain profits, and human labor would be most efficiently spent automating labor. Regardless of what happens to the JOB market (in terms of the ratio of human-jobs vs automated-jobs insofar as distinct "jobs" still exist), the LABOR market improves since work is being done for less expense.

In a society in which resources are allocated to enable a minimum standard of living for all members, any member who wants to work for resources, that human can choose to do so in any manner available as before. The complete freedom to work offered by Benign Capitalism ensures that humans who choose to work will be in a position to do work of interest to them -- most so than in Hostile Capitalism, whereby some humans are force to accept the first work opportunity to present itself, regardless of interest level. This is fundamental to the human need of "self-actualisation" as defined right at the peak of the Maslow hierarchy.

When you have possible entrepreneurs in the billions, you have innovation on a grander scale than anything before in civilisation. The result of innovation is invariably greater resource abundance, and greater resource variety.

Anecdotal evidence can certainly be provided for the assumer claiming that they, as an individual, would not work if given the choice. There may be other examples of others who publicly claim that they'd give up all work if doing so didn't diminish their lifestyle. I've felt like that a few times before, when doing work that was pointless and without meaning. But I don't feel that way now that my work contributes to my vision of a better world for humans to live in. The will to give up on work is a temporary feeling; it's not a "type of human".

Can the assumption be disproven then?

Yes, anecdotal evidence at the individual level also applies equally to counter the assumption. Look at any successful entrepreneur. Elon Musk has enough money to live a lavish lifestyle for the rest of his days, yet he busts his ass working for his several companies. Some humans just want to do their work. Some just want something helpful to do. These anecdotes describe behaviours measurable over time, not just feelings over time.

But empirical evidence, of course, is the basis of all good judgement.

Do we have any to validate or invalidate the assumption that humans only work if they need to? Or to show the proportions of humans who will seek out work versus those who would prefer to live off the productivity of others?

Not yet. Universal Basic Income trials are being explored at a national scale in various ways in Europe, notably the work being done in the Netherlands (see citation 8 at the end). Canada and India are investigating and planning their own trials. Even the technology community of California's "Silicon Valley" is getting involved. Efficacy data is near, but not yet here. The knowledge is still being manufactured.

In the mean time we have a hypothesis: basic income will significantly improve human living experience. Such experiments will yield large scale data to empirically show the economic and sociological effects of basic income, whatever they are. The data would then be used to evaluate the adoption and adaptation of the Basic Income model by other wealthy nations. Like the USA, where the economy can easily support it and the only question remaining is: "Should we?"

Until then, assumption 5 remains unanswered.

Exponential automation is a process that's slow to start and quick to end. But that end only means the automation of all existing work. New work can be created from any idea -- and when work like viability tests, polling, and market research are automated, entrepreneurship will eventually be a matter of ideation -- an intrinsically human knowledge task.

During the process of automating all work, human labor will shift first out of the realm of necessary manual labour (the OPTION of human manual labor will always exist), continuing the existing trend of human knowledge work uptake. In 1920 the ration of manual laborers to knowledge workers was 2:1. By 1955 the ratio was 1:1. And in 1980, the ratio was 1:2. [Citation 9, 10]

That transitional period was a major milestone in the human labor market, and the exponential growth of that ratio has been in effect ever since. The same pattern is being observed with automation. Note in the below graph published by technologyreview.com in 2013, which shows in 2000 the differential spike between US domestic productivity and "job growth". Note also the trend of separation ever since.

From the above data, we see two significant trends:

1. US automation is increasing
   
2. US job growth has stopped increasing and is leveling out
   

What if these two trends continue? Automation and job growth began to part ways 40 years ago: that's quite the efficacy test. We know we will still need a way to allocate resources, and that working for them isn't viable. We also know that fighting automation is impossible. Benign Capitalism is financially viable and resolves the most pressing issue by decoupling resource allocation from human labor. And it does so without compromising capitalism or the nation's economy. (Yes, I'm clearly trying to sell you this idea. You should buy it, while you still have some disposable income to buy things with.)

Humans will do less work, as technology does more. An increasing portion of the work done by humans will be new types of work that become viable as a result of technology (i.e. the greater resource variety produced by advances in automation). Eventually, the work done by humans will be predominantly innovation: new work, invented to produce resources more efficiently, or to produce new resources that didn't previously exist.

You'll work if you want. And your original ideas will have more value than ever before, thanks to automation.

I find this is a difficult thing to hear. It's certainly too difficult for me to think.

The purpose of human life is to experience joy. Not to pursue joy, and not to create it. Specifically to experience it. Pursuit and creation of joy are definitely part of the means. But the experience of joy is the end goal.

To deny that fact is a hypocrisy. Here's a breakdown of why:

1. All human labor has been driven by the fulfillment of a need, the avoidance of a threat, or the pursuit of joy, or a combination of those 3 reason types.
2. Every human need ever met, and every threat avoided, was done with the intention to prolong life.
3. Every human life ever to prolong itself did so in order to enable subsequent experiences of joy.

From those 3 points we can deduce that every human action is traceable, directly or indirectly, to the pursuit of joy as the end goal.

Consider as many examples as you want. You'll find the logic always holds up.

(By all means cite your clever personal or hypothetical anecdote contrary to these points if you'd like to try to disprove these claims! If you believe the prime directive of human life is NOT to experience joy, it would be valuable to us both to understand the basis of your belief. It would be interesting to know if any of those claims were wrong.)

Regardless of our beliefs, the fact remains that once all work is automated there will be nothing left to humanity BUT the pursuit of joy.

So we'd better make sure our descendants can handle it.

Thanks for learning!
Michael

Not done with this topic? Good, because automation is far from done with you. Check out this fantastic, detailed resource from The Atlantic, A World Without Work

And this punchy conversational resource by the genius Eliezer Yudkowsky, who reminds us that labour isn't a finite lump; the scope of possible labour literally matches the scope of the aggregated human imagination.

Or broaden your world view by exploring the citations and data that contributed to this article, upon which this proof of concept for Benign Captialism was based. Inspect the merchandise, so to speak. I'm sure you'll find it all in order.

Citations

CITATION 1: Cost of living calculated for the United states, specified by CareerTrends.com http://cost-of-living.careertrends.com/l/615/The-United-States
CITATION 2: 2015 Population of USA, specified by CIA World Factbook: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/us.html
CITATION 3: 2014 USA Populace under 18, specified by US census data: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/
CITATION 4: US GDP, specified by WorldBank.org http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD
CITATION 5: Why GDP is the most valid metric for measuring the size of a nation's economy, specified by Investopedia.com: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/199.asp
CITATION 6: http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm
CITATION 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
CITATION 8: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/06/netherlands-utrecht-universal-basic-income-experiment/487883/
CITATION 9: http://www.nickols.us/shift_to_KW.htm
CITATION 10: http://forschungsnetzwerk.at/downloadpub/knowledge_workers_the_biggest_challenge.pdf

Bonus link!

A data driven look at the history of automation from The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/aug/17/technology-created-more-jobs-than-destroyed-140-years-data-census