debate about minimum wage laws and future of work/ITon a ;policy list

X:... the most enlightened minimum wage laws and working condition regulations are developed using sophisticated economic models, and  studies confirm that some work as intended...<

Y: Again with the miraculous economic models, etc.  besides, min wage laws are pretty much a club.  And as I mentioned about 2/3rds of of owe under new min wages lose their jobs.  It's very basic economics, no need to over analyze (for a excuse to over control?)  If the jobs were worth the new mandated prices, they would likely be paid about that already. 

My response:

Since these are both tricky and life-or-death issues, I am maybe halfway through writing an essay on the challenge here (especially as a challenge to IT, the technology which is replacing humans here and now). 

For the moment... just a few quick thoughts. The many studies of future jobs reviewed by the Millennium project say that 2/3 of ALL the jobs will be lost, not just the minimum wage ones. Some would say; "If these folks are not worth it, they SHOULD lose their jobs, to hell with the consequences, because what are those humans worth anyway?"

What's worse, the human policy types who served in those studies were paying close conservative attention to what they already know; at the frontiers of IT , we can see that NO HUMANS ARE NEEDED ON EARTH. Clearly, adherence to that line of evaluation is in itself a threat to the existence of the human species!

It is important to understand that "WORTH" here is not something magical which our corporations get from God on a burning bush in the Sinai, but more like a rule from the SEC. There is a WHOLE lot of market failure out there right now, what Trump has rightly called a "rigged system." (Why did Google insist on injecting a question mark when I typed "Trump"? I really wonder sometimes about "the soul in the machine". This is not the first time  by far.) All markets now are DESIGNED markets, like the electric power markets today maintained by computers and viable (not so rigged) only after many years of technical study and retuning. A key part of the challenge is how to design automated markets (as all markets will be before long) which accurately reflect the value of human beings, at least enough to maintain their existence and -- in my view -- their full human potential, material and intellectual and spiritual. HOW TO BUILD SUCH AN IT SYSTEM? It is a crucial challenge, which no one has fulfilled as yet.

There are times, when I consider the hopes and dreams of Robert Mercer (who is working closely with Charles Koch in remaking the world economy, and liberating their computers from any government influence, partly documented in the excellent book Dark Money), that I am reminded of a scene in Asimov's extended Foundation trilogy, where he describes a planet with a human population which has slowly dropped to a few thousand but has a huge GNP to support those people, disintegrating bit by bit to where it all dies in just a few thousand years. So what is value then? Or would the intelligent AIs step in and forestall the disintegration in the obvious way? I expect so, but weak systems in any ocean are the first to discover how invasions can work.