AI 'Godfather' Geoffrey Hinton: If AI Takes Jobs We'll Need Universal Basic Income (bbc.com) 250
"The computer scientist regarded as the 'godfather of artificial intelligence' says the government will have to establish a universal basic income to deal with the impact of AI on inequality," reports the BBC:
Professor Geoffrey Hinton told BBC Newsnight that a benefits reform giving fixed amounts of cash to every citizen would be needed because he was "very worried about AI taking lots of mundane jobs".
"I was consulted by people in Downing Street and I advised them that universal basic income was a good idea," he said. He said while he felt AI would increase productivity and wealth, the money would go to the rich "and not the people whose jobs get lost and that's going to be very bad for society".
"Until last year he worked at Google, but left the tech giant so he could talk more freely about the dangers from unregulated AI," according to the article. Professor Hinton also made this predicction to the BBC. "My guess is in between five and 20 years from now there's a probability of half that we'll have to confront the problem of AI trying to take over".
He recommended a prohibition on the military use of AI, warning that currently "in terms of military uses I think there's going to be a race".
"I was consulted by people in Downing Street and I advised them that universal basic income was a good idea," he said. He said while he felt AI would increase productivity and wealth, the money would go to the rich "and not the people whose jobs get lost and that's going to be very bad for society".
"Until last year he worked at Google, but left the tech giant so he could talk more freely about the dangers from unregulated AI," according to the article. Professor Hinton also made this predicction to the BBC. "My guess is in between five and 20 years from now there's a probability of half that we'll have to confront the problem of AI trying to take over".
He recommended a prohibition on the military use of AI, warning that currently "in terms of military uses I think there's going to be a race".
No, we really don't (Score:5, Insightful)
All it will end up being is just another stupid institution like minimum wage that just ends up being a constant game of chasing ones tail against inflation while itself doing nothing but adding to it, and everybody who depends on it will always insist that it isn't enough in perpetuity for exactly that reason. All this shit ever does is penalize saving, exactly the opposite of what the government should be doing.
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If you are running an economy you don't want people "saving" though. You want that money in motion, you want people to spend and invest the money, not just sit on it. The reason every central bank targets 0-3% inflation is because we already know deflation can carry some strong negatives. If I think my money will be worth more tomorrow I have little incentive to spend any of it today unless I absolutely have to.
If we in America have a moral issue with "free money" then a more fitting solution is to brin
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> If I think my money will be worth more tomorrow I have little incentive to spend any of it today unless I absolutely have to.
This is already happening. Why do you think clowns are piling into overinflated stocks, overinflated housing and overinflated precious metals? Because they're still not as overinflated as fiat currency.
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Why do you think clowns are piling into overinflated stocks, overinflated housing and overinflated precious metals?
The people doing that in fact represent a very narrow slice of the economy and that slice is already flush with money to spend. All those things are still purchased with US dollars and if you are hedging inflation with stocks and housing, well, you are probably a clown but your wealth is insulating you from bad decisions. We in the USA have also been programmed an incentivized to view our homes as investment and those are bad incentives that have lead to our inflated housing market.
Gold trading volume is
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> If you are running an economy you don't want people "saving" though.
> You want that money in motion, you want people to spend and invest the money, not just sit on it.
You just confirmed that manipulating money to keep people spending doesn't work. They can just dump that money into assets as an alternative to saving FIAT.
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Yeah, the point of currency is as a medium for wealth, not the wealth itself. Dumping that money into assets is exactly what we want, buying a share of SPY is still "spending" even if the velocity is lower than a direct spend, especially since for most people at some point the returns from that will also be spent.
And it can absolutely work, consumer spending today is at record levels Savings Rates Pressured as Consumer Spending Outpaces Disposable Personal Income Growth [pymnts.com]
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If I think my money will be worth more tomorrow I have little incentive to spend any of it today unless I absolutely have to.
This is already happening. Why do you think clowns are piling into overinflated stocks, overinflated housing and overinflated precious metals?
Because they believe in inflation, not deflation. They are piling in to speculative things because these have the potential of growing in dollar terms and protecting them from inflation. That is, the loss of their money's value.
The whole "keep the money moving" idea also benefits governments tax revenues. People are motivated to keep their money moving (sales taxes) and obliged to value their productivity and wealth in terms of an ever decreasing fiat currency value (income and capitol gains taxes).
Re:No, we really don't (Score:4, Informative)
If you are running an economy you don't want people "saving" though. You want that money in motion, you want people to spend and invest the money, not just sit on it.
Two thoughts.
First, no one "runs" an economy any more than anyone controls public opinion. An economy is how we describe the aggregate action of millions of people. At best you might nudge an economy one way or the other.
Second, saved money is not idle. Banks since 1500 have lent that money as fast as they can putting it back into action. Virtually none of a bank's assets are in a vault. From a macroeconomic perspective, there's little difference between spending, saving, and investing: they're all ways to get money in motion. The only way for money to be truly idle is if you put cash under your mattress.
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Well I mean that's what the central banks are doing, nudging things with monetary policy. The US Fed has two metrics they track and care about; unemployment and inflation. While they don't "control" it so much of it is girded at the foundations by interest rates and monetary supply. If it was no big deal then having ZIRP for a decade or having 5% rates today wouldn't make a difference.
And yes while having money in a savings account is not "idle" it's pretty low velocity as opposed to other forms of inve
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CPI YoY is currently 3.6% and wages are up in general, especially on the lower end. If thing's are so crushingly expensive why is consumer spending at record levels right now? I'm not implying there are problem. Also my point is that interest rates are actually very important, what are you even getting at?
Even if what you said was true what is your prescription to rising prices outside of raising wages and raising interest rates? Do you try to induce deflation? I would ask how do you do that and how do y
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What if pigs develop spaceships and leave us all behind?
Re:No, we really don't (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny how you play word games with "capitalism" (properly regulated) yet just take for granted what UBI means.
Capitalism doesn't raise anyone "out of poverty", an effective economy that harnesses capitalism, and controls it through "proper regulation", does.
Likewise, UBI doesn't do anything either. But an effective tax system that supports people that would otherwise be "in poverty" might. That tax system could employ what people like to call UBI.
People certainly could be out of work as wealth becomes more and more isolated to the rich. That would represent a failure of "proper regulation" of "capitalism", something that things like "UBI" are meant to address.
"AI will raise our standard of living by making people more productive."
On our current trajectory that will certainly not be the case.
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Nobody knows how UBI would work or how it would be funded.
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Pegging a UBI to market behavior is very risky. Market swings would affect everyone's direct income rather than affecting a bunch of retirement accounts as they do today.
As far as establishing a sovereign wealth fund goes, first you have to establish positive income at the national scale. Countries such as Saudi Arabia can make SWFs work due to massive revenue from state-owned ventures. The United States government is currently income negative and asset negative.
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UBI is a fantasy. Capitalism is the one system that has consistently worked to raise people out of poverty.
Capitalism has never raised anyone out of poverty without controls on who can profit. As we have weakened those controls, capitalism has become less of a force for lifting people from poverty and more of a force for keeping them there.
UBI isn't anti-capitalistic any more than taxation. Both are ways to make the system work sustainably.
People are not going to be out of work. Old jobs may disappear, but new ones will appear.
That is not a cleanly managed process with working social systems to handle the overlap. The social safety net payout amounts are all based on a federal minimum wage which is
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As a useless person, can I ask why you haven't legalized drugs and suicide yet so I can voluntarily and legally off myself in a sane, comfortable manner of my choosing?
Re:No, we really don't (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, in any case there will be a correction. Open markets do not function without consumers, and consumers with empty wallets do not buy anything.
Re: No, we really don't (Score:2)
Old jobs may disappear, but new ones will appear.
This is an assumption that will likely one day just not hold true. If we manage to get technology that can meet and/or exceed human capabilities at all sorts of "work", we may not have any ambition that we uniquely can fulfill that would suggest human labor.
One of these disruptions is going to hit that scenario. It's worth keeping that potential in mind and be careful as things progress, lest we end up with a capitalist game of musical chairs where the owner class leaves no seats for anyone when the music
This is patently false (Score:5, Insightful)
The tech that made all that possible was developed in public universities using government dollars because there wasn't enough short-term gain to bring capitalists into it. It took decades and decades to develop that and capitalists aren't the kind of people to plant trees whose shade they will never lie in.
Capitalism works great for figuring out the best ice cream in Twinkies. It's really good at getting us the little nice things that add to a good life. If you look at the Soviet Union back in the day after they got rid of Stalin they had a surprisingly stable economy but what they didn't have are things like video game consoles and Coca-Cola and nice clothes.
The solution is a hybrid economy where you can exchange money for those extra niceties but where food and shelter and healthcare and education and the transportation needed to use those things are all guaranteed.
I hope UBI comes to pass... (Score:2, Insightful)
...so i can raise rents by that amount and make bank.
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You mean, the totalitarian rule of Hamas has anything related to capitalism?
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Was it Israel who started this war? Or the wars before? And does Israel have "Death to [the other side]" on their flags and complete eradication of the other side in their foundation documents?
Compare the rights of arabs (ie, those people supposedly being apartheided against) in Israel-held areas vs Hamas-held. And, in which area the victim of rape gets punished instead of the perpetrator? And so on, so on...
Re: No, we really don't (Score:2)
I'm the US at least the economy was great in the 90s. Famously so.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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by fully indexing both income and savings to nominal price rises
Minus things like food, energy and housing. Because those are just too volatile. Pretty soon, the index will consist of only Funko Pop and Beanie Babies.
Wait! Funko Pop prices just went up. So they are off the list. Beanie Babies it is, then.
If the tractor takes jobs... (Score:5, Insightful)
then all the farmers plowing with horses will be out of work. If word processors take jobs, then all the typists will need UBI. Etc.
An LLM is just a tool. We've been developing better tools for hundreds of years. Some jobs disappear, other jobs appear. People need to get a grip.
Re: If the tractor takes jobs... (Score:2)
Re: If the tractor takes jobs... (Score:2)
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All new technology waves in the past have created more jobs than they destroyed. In some cases, it should have been obvious at the time that this would be the case, and at others less so. Now the question is whether AI will continue the same pattern we've seen in the past, or if it is fundamentally different. There are some really good reasons to argue that this is different, in which case universal basic income sounds like it may well be the answer.
If companies that currently employ hundreds of thousand
Re: If the tractor takes jobs... (Score:3)
Not really, the question is even if this technology creates more jobs in the long run - how do you mitigate the disruption of the economy, redistribution and concentration of capital and the social cost... to prevent poverty, political and social unrest?
Technological optimists - and I'd still include myself on that camp - often gloss over the historical details of most previous tech revolutions in the spirit of long-termism, and use the term luddite as a smear.
But the farmers, artisans, miners and factory w
Re:If the tractor takes jobs... (Score:5, Interesting)
You're missing the fact that it is inevitable that humans will be surpassed in every way by something at some point in the future, so your argument is guaranteed to be wrong either now or when one of the next 'tools' comes around.
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Maybe in this scenario you're more like the horses, who got new jobs at the glue factory. What, do you think God guaranteed that you'll have a job no matter what? There's a chance mysterious new jobs appear -- but explain how you think it's guaranteed? Perhaps you need to get a grip on the fact not everyone wants to passively sit around gambling away their future in the hopes everything somehow turns out fine.
Nope. Wrong. This time ... (Score:2)
... things are different.
To quote CPCgrey:
"There is no law that says: Better technology makes more better jobs for horses. But somehow when we swap 'horses' for 'humans' everybody thinks it's right."
It isn't. Machines have mostly voided human manual labor. Now machines are voiding human brain labor. And very soon artificial humans (aka robots) with artificial intelligence will void the last bits of human manual labor that requires brains.
Watch this video in full to see what is happening right now.
And prepar
Videolink got lost (Score:2)
Here it is:
https://youtu.be/7Pq-S557XQU [youtu.be]
The thing is yes that's true (Score:2)
So yes it's quite possible that our great great grandkids after
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An LLM can automatize bureaucracy. This is the first time in history this has become economically feasible to do on large scale. That is not a productive job, but a type of jobs that keeps a major part of the population employed. Cheaper bureaucracy does not cause increased production.
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then all the farmers plowing with horses will be out of work. If word processors take jobs, then all the typists will need UBI. Etc.
An LLM is just a tool. We've been developing better tools for hundreds of years. Some jobs disappear, other jobs appear. People need to get a grip.
a) It's true those transitions created new jobs, in most cases better than the jobs they replaced, but the people who had those old jobs are not the people who got the new jobs. For the people with the old jobs it really sucked, but we don't hear about them much because losers don't get to write much of the history.
b) Previous tools either enhanced physical power, or directly increased mental productivity for the human using the tool. Right now, LLMs are increasing mental productivity, but that's only becau
Re: If the tractor takes jobs... (Score:2)
How come the risk of Alzheimer's is lower for people at risk of cardiac arrest? Could it be a healthy diet is detrimental to cognitive abilities?
There are valid arguments to debate UBI vs liberal capitalism - but this seems an argument for universal education on statistics.
Re: If the tractor takes jobs... (Score:2)
This period of time what all the stories of past dictatorships your history teach taught were prepping for. Suicides through the roof, drug overdoses, leaders proposing internment camps with forced medication for all the newly created homeless:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news... [msn.com]
These are the backdrops of the AI stuff.
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Well you can't make people selfless. Sure, if you set up a communistic economy, some people will comply, but the ones who continue to further their self interest will ruin it for everyone else. People won't work hard because they get paid the same anyway, productivity will be down, quality will be garbage, and things will go badly.
Capitalism isn't a utopia, but it works better than all the other attempts at utopia that we have made so far.
Re: If the tractor takes jobs... (Score:2)
Why do you think R&D will be unaffected by AI? It will take longer but I would expect it to happen there too.
Non-economist says dumb thing about economics (Score:3, Insightful)
1) AI is no where near replacing any significant number of jobs (note I said jobs not people)
2) every single time technology has made workers more efficient we ended up with more jobs, not fewer
3) He may be a brilliant computer scientist but he knows absolutely fuck all about anything else. Expertise in one field actually reducing the likelihood of expertise in other unrelated fields due to focus
4) He is suffering from a limited form of Dunning Kruger where he falsely assumes his vertical knowledge in one field makes him qualified to talk about other unrelated verticals.
5) UBI doesn't solve anything anyway. It's just another inflationary welfare system that will result in corporations gaining even more power and wealth while the lower classes grow ever larger and more dependent upon government. We've literally spent 30+ trillion dollars in the fight against poverty and all we bought for it was more poverty. Where the fuck did 30 trillion dollars go?
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"UBI doesn't solve anything anyway. It's just another inflationary welfare system ..."
I love how you rightly criticize another person's lack of expertise the prove to everyone it's really just projection.
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1) Au contraire. The only reason a lot of bureaucracy (and hence a lot of jobs) were not automatized so far was that creating the systems for that would have been too costly. LLMs change that dramatically.
2) Every single time so far _production_ got automatized. This time, for the first time in human history, bureaucracy is getting automatized on a large scale. More and cheaper bureaucracy does not cause higher productivity. Quite the contrary.
3) Nonsensical statement is nonsense. You are pushing an AdHomin
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Why should those who want a better life have to support people who literally do nothing but breed, eat, piss, and shit?
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I dunno, perhaps maybe there's something to be said for wanting a better life for everyone, not just for ourselves? Just because they are people, not because they "do something for you"?
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Ok, I'm going to sit on my ass all day and then do some breeding.
Send me your money.
No? Why not? I deserve a better life. I am people. Right?
So send me your fucking money or the IRS will take it.
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I dunno, perhaps maybe there's something to be said for wanting a better life for everyone, not just for ourselves? Just because they are people, not because they "do something for you"?
It is ultimately doing people a disservice to deprive them of natural incentives to get off their asses.
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Of enough people get fucked (as you desire), society stops working.
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Is this a serious question? Are you _really_ that dumb? You support that everybody can live decently in order to not see society literally burn. Look, for example, at the French revolution. Yes, you can want more than that, but everybody needs to have a reasonable share or society stops working.
Re: Non-economist says dumb thing about economics (Score:2)
If we get to the point where machines can do most things as well as humans, how do we let everyone contribute?
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Oh so we can cut poverty payments in half, right?
Everyone is good with that since poverty has been cut in half. Should be a no brainer.
Would you agree?
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That's.... that's not how this works at all? The percentage is out of the whole, the rate of poverty could have dropped in 50 years but the total amount of people in poverty could have actually increased with a rising population.
Also if you're not in poverty, you don't get any payments, if you are still in poverty why would we cut your payments in half? Also this implies the US has a robust cash-up-front system when we really don't, most welfare in the US is wraparound; SNAP, WIC, Medicaid, Section 8, reba
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So despite poverty decreasing we have to put more ones than ever into fighting poverty, and make ever more programs with UBI being the ultimate in poverty creation.
You know what happens when people end up on welfare and don't work? By definition they are in poverty. So we can either require they get jobs to work their way out, not count welfare recipients in the poverty statistics or play the inflation game by printing ever larger amounts of money to hand out to get people above the poverty line which is
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Can we seamlessly automate the third option so that everyone just goes about their business not worrying about having a decent standard of living that no one is paying for?
Ban on military use of AI (Score:2)
> He recommended a prohibition on the military use of AI, warning that currently "in terms of military uses I think there's going to be a race".
This is even more idiotic than his UBI statement.
How exactly does he plan to have our enemies not use AI in their weapon systems? There's already a race. He's either naive or senile. Hey I know let's ban the use of terrorism. Let's ban the use of hacking. Let's ban drugs, murder, rape, arson, car crashes, drowning, dog bites, and cat scratches.
Because obviou
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We need to get a movement going.
We could try it out on drugs first.
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Yeah, it's a little late.
They're already using AI in drones so that they can hit their targets even if they get hit with electronic warfare interference that cuts off their control signal. I believe both sides are already implementing this. And they'll just keep pushing the line between human control and automation.
Yes, there are dangers, but those concerns get left behind when the enemy is shelling your homes and leveling your cities as they advance across your country.
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Yeah, people are all twisted up about ChatGPT's autocomplete powers.
In the meantime the military has been using many forms of AI for decades. And its only getting more and more dangerous.
ChatGPT doesn't scare me. The military industrial complex does.
Skynet isn't going to destroy the world because it used an offensive term. Militaries, however, are actively decimating entire cities right now as we speak!
There's no "if" (Score:2)
Even the current LLMs can take a significant number of jobs. And they won't be evenly distributed across the population. Some specialties will be affected harder and sooner than others. Others will be hardly affected at all...by this round.
If we had lots of strong unions that were actively interested in furthering the benefits of their members, I'd worry less. As it is ... well, there's a strong imbalance of power, and it's going to get more unbalanced. Universal Basic Income would be a way to handle t
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As the current LLMs are basically what we will have for the next few decades, that is significant. The problem is that they can automatize bureaucracy. They cannot automatize production (hallucinations are not fixable and are a real killer), but bureaucratic processes are highly fault-tolerant as they are already typically designed by incompetent morons and mostly just aim to waste everybody's time. But here is the problem: These bureaucratic processes waste a lot of time and a lot of that is paid "work" ti
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Well, OK, that's ONE example of the kind of work they will replace. But it's hardly the only one.
Ok but let's use it to replace the minimum wage (Score:2)
Companies could hire more people if they didn't have to pay a minimum wage. People could go back to school or start a business or leave an abusive employer if they didn't have to worry about affording food. We could also eliminate social security retirement benefits and other welfare programs. People could work longer hours or change jobs if they didn't have to worry about losing benefits if they earn too much. [wikipedia.org]
Brilliant guy says stupid things (Score:2)
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It seems to be a disease common to rock stars and scientists. As soon as they achieve some success in their narrow field of specialization, they assume they've become Renaissance Men, qualified to pontificate on all matters great and small.
If you're having kids, you're irresponsible (Score:2)
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AI will actually be mostly where it is today. But that is enough to cause massive problems.
If your answer to everything is socialism (Score:2)
then whatever else you are, you're also a socialist, and your credentials are orthogonal to that. And thus irrelevant. So one more Ivory Tower academic pushing for the techno-socialist utopia. Didn't work when Marx did it, didn't work when Marcuse did it. Won't work now either.
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This is not socialism. Stop abusing terminology for propaganda.
Argentina (Score:3)
Argentina basically has a Universal Basic Income system. It has decimated the economy.
For example, in one town there was a sugar factory. Traditionally workers were paid a salary to go cut the sugar cane for the factory. However, because of the "universal income" that goes to people that have no employment, workers prefer to earn 1/3 of the salary and just stay home and maybe informally earning some money here and there to complement their income now and then.
The result? There's no more factory.
This has happened all around the country. So I'm very skeptical of these UBI schemes people come up with.
Also, from an economic point of view, if you subsidize consumer spending inflation goes nuts. You want give money to production so that goods and services grow at the same rate as the availability of money. Then you don't get slammed by inflation.
Argentina is slammed by inflation. It's a total disaster. UBI type policies are encouraging people to stay home and not work. While the government heavily taxes businesses. There's no incentive to hire people, and there's no incentive to be hired. Where do you think that will go?
ps. the current government is trying to change this, but it remains to be seen if they can
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Don't worry, UBI will totally work if there is a massive megacorporation paying for it.
Just don't ask what they want in return, and why there are no competitors whatsoever for this megacorporation.
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The primary concern driving the push for UBI, is that advancements in A.I. will result in highly automated systems, backed by a few massive mega corporations, to maintain a minimal subsistence. As priorities are reorganized, inflation goes nuts.
The concept is that A
Outlawing AI cannot work, necessity knows no law. (Score:2)
Military overmatch trumps everything else because the alternative is relying on the kindness of your enemies.
Europe tried that experiment at Munich but selling out Czechoslovakia didn't work. Then it chose to greet Putin legs akimbo with predictable results. That Putin invaded Ukraine reflects failed deterrence.
AI is a military necessity so it will must and will be used. The world was, is and will remain a very bad place where the only security is ability to apply decisive violence (this is often delegated
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This - mark parent up. It's the arms racing again, that's how we humans operate. And it's always (has been) balanced. Though the AI's runaway it more possible these days. The atomic weapons were/are dangerous but our of reach of small groups operating out the their garages. Unleashing a self-serving, self-reserving AI will probably be achievable, with some reasonable effort, in near feature out of a garage. Not sure there is anything that can be done about it. So nations of the world will start preparing AI
Biggest problem with UBI... (Score:3)
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Dishonest. I've not ever met somebody who was pro-abortion or pro-open borders but I have met an actual Marxist. You strawman all the time, benefiting from the ignorance of people who can't yet see your tactics. Eventually, you lose them when they realize the lies you've been spewing.
2/3 of illegals do not cross the border, they come in (flying) and do not leave. Also since a messed up policy change almost a century ago, has made it difficult for migratory workers to migrate so they are incentivized to stay
If there are no workers (Score:2)
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Watch the US. (Score:2)
It'll happen there first, the breakdown I mean.
They have lost control of their corporate class, who will do whatever they think will increase their wealth.
The US corporate overlords will go down that path and for a while they'll make bank, encouraging them all to do it.
Eventually they'll hit a tipping point though al la Great Depression but it'll be worse and the plebs there are kept ignorant and also armed to the teeth.
The cities will burn and the country will Balkanise. Some more intelligent people there
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The cities will burn and the country will Balkanise. Some more intelligent people there will see it coming but they'll be too few to stop it.
Yep, probably. And these people are leaving. I have noticed that over the past 10 years or so, more and more highly qualified people have been moving from the US to Europe.
Won't a general AI want to be paid (Score:2)
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You are under a misconception here: AI is a marketing term. These systems are automation. They have no insight or understanding of anything. But, as it turns out, a lot of jobs have large parts that do not require insight or understanding and with generative AI it has gotten a lot easier to build automation for them. Hence most jobs will not go away, but a lot of white-collar jobs will require a lot less people to do them and there will be no replacements for those jobs. Nobody needs more paper pushed and p
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I think that most jobs r
He is not wrong (Score:2)
In needs to be done, it needs to be enough to live decently off it, but it will not be enough. People need meaning in their lives or they become a problem. Most cannot supply that meaning by themselves. So far, work did a somewhat acceptable of providing that meaning, but that seems to not really work anymore already.
Sort of obvious, and not just AI (Score:2)
If AI takes away jobs and those workers are unable to find new jobs, then they will need government or societal assistance. However, that is true for any new technology, or even for any non-technology change, e.g., government regulations or economic/political changes. This is not an AI-specific issue.
Jobs have always continually disappeared throughout history. Many/most people have been able to find new jobs, although some of those jobs don't pay as well or are more demanding. If AI had never happened,
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So no UBI so far, and look at current state of affairs in the US: a significant majority of Americans would face financial ruin if they had to pay an unexpected expense of a few hundred bucks.
Your vision and intelligence are a beacon to us all!
Majority (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm assuming you mean this article:
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/2... [cnbc.com]
Your "significant majority" is 27%. That's an interesting framing device. I would say a significant majority of 73% is *not* $400 away from financial ruin, but I guess that wouldn't prove me wrong using some version of tortured logic.
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It's still not a majority, but I don't know why you used an article from 2019 when articles from 2023 readily pop up, and the numbers are quite a lot worse. It's around 40% now.
https://fortune.com/2023/05/23... [fortune.com]
More recently, 66% of Americans don't think they could cover a month of living expenses in an emergency.
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
Next time, just use the 'in the past year' tool when doing a google search. Stories from 2019--pre-pandemic!--don't really have much credibility in 2024.
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More recently, 66% of Americans don't think they could cover a month of living expenses in an emergency.
https://www.usatoday.com/story... [usatoday.com]
Next time, just use the 'in the past year' tool when doing a google search. Stories from 2019--pre-pandemic!--don't really have much credibility in 2024.
When you dig into that "66%" Bankrate survey, the original quote is "Only 44% of U.S. adults would pay an emergency expense of $1,000 or more from their savings", which doesn't mean the same thing as "couldn't cover a month of living expenses".
Depending on how the survey cast the "emergency savings" question, I'd answer differently, as it becomes a question not of assets, but liquidity.
$400 isn't financial security (Score:3)
Meanwhile the percentage of Americans living paycheck to paycheck is 60-80% (depending on the study). Meaning when that $400 "safety net" inevitably gets wiped out they're not going to be able to replenish it.
So yeah, OP is basically correct even if *technically* it's a little more than a few hundred dollars before they'd be financially ruined. i.e. it's closer to a grand. Which is, again, *technically* not a few hundred dollars.
Years ago when
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Maybe they can barter using a fungible intermediate to facilitate transactions? We will call this intermediate "Buckaroos".
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Money is obsolete since humans mostly not needed. Controllers of resources simply barter with each other on a macro scale.
Not sure if you are serious. I'll assume you are.
To what end? So we have a bunch of robot/AI factories trading goods. What is the point unless those goods get shipped to actual people who want to use the actual products?
This is why Bastiat exhorted us to always look at economic issues from the perspective of the consumer and why the general view in economics is that the purpose of an economy is to satisfy desires for consumption. Production is a necessary complement but definitely the tail, not the dog. If
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Consumerism seems a rather narrow, unimaginative way to consider radical changes in the world of work, production, & human well-being.
Ah. I think you misunderstand Bastiat and me. The key observation is nothing we do has any actual value until it's purchased by the ultimate end user to meet some need of that end user. Everything else is a means to that end. It's actually a profound insight.
Don't think of it "consumer products" as only, say, Netflix movies and frivolous trinkets. Food is a consumer good. So is housing. So is travel to visit your family. So is producing tents for homeless people. So is sending a relief convoy to Gaza or doc
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I believe the implication was there was no united organization among civilians to control the inflation of resources. Nobody even bothers with receipts anymore in the drive-thrus of fast food restaurants.
I'm still a little fuzzy what's being implied. If this is a post-scarcity society, were I can have more or less anything I want off the shelf without working for it, that sounds great. I'll be off hiking the Appalachian Trail, let me know what great thing you want to do with all your time free.
If it's saying some small kabal of people will own all the factories and produce all the products, and be able to dictate prices which the rest of us will just have to accept, I don't think that's realistic. As soon a
Money is a sign of poverty (Iain Banks / Culture) (Score:4, Interesting)
https://theculture.fandom.com/... [fandom.com]
Star Trek also has an aspect of moving beyond a money:
https://memory-alpha.fandom.co... [fandom.com]
That said, I have written about five Interwoven Economies: subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft. Any society will have a culturally-appropriate mix of them.
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Money is how people signal their needs in the exchange economy, and people without money may still have unmet needs which are otherwise neglected. So, a universal basic income softens the harshness of an exchange economy by allowing everyone to participate (even when they don't have anything of value to trade).
On your point on barter to replace money, I agree to an extent (ignoring the implication human needs could be ignored). US fiat dollars are essentially kanban tokens to signal demand (like tennis balls or 3x5 index cards in some factories or Bugzilla tickets or just plain emails in some software projects). Kanban is not quite the same as barter though, since is a broader concept that supports fine-grained signalling potentially across an entire network of controllers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Kanban cards are a key component of kanban and they signal the need to move materials within a production facility or to move materials from an outside supplier into the production facility. The kanban card is, in effect, a message that signals a depletion of product, parts, or inventory. When received, the kanban triggers replenishment of that product, part, or inventory. Consumption, therefore, drives demand for more production, and the kanban card signals demand for more productâ"so kanban cards help create a demand-driven system."
Some alternatives for when most human labor has less and less value include:
* strengthening the subsistence economy by developing self-replicating 3D printers (RepRap), or gardening robots (FarmBot), or solar panels and so on.
* strengthening the gift economy for free information (the web and Slashdot, Thingiverse, and the Internet Archive) and for free or very cheap material goods (FreeCycle, Craigslist to an extent, etc).
* improving the planned economy in various ways like to support open government (including through tools like IBIS for Dialogue Mapping of discussions about Wicked problems for public meetings or tools like Loomio for collaborative decision making, etc.).
All these different types of transactions can interact and overlap (like a government could plan to support the development of improved 3D printers using money supplied to researchers who then publish their results under free and open source licenses).
I am increasingly unsure if "exchange" transactions will ever go away even in some future post-scarcity society (at the very least at an interpersonal level of "you scratch my back and I will scratch yours"). I do think a healthy society will usually have a healthy culturally-and-technologically-appropriate mix of subsistence, gift, exchange, and planned transactions.
One issue with current US society is an imbalance towards emphasizing exchange transactions to the exclusion of all others . This is reflected in relatively dismissing the value of participation in subsistence, gift, and planned activities by the mainstream while celebrating earning money and spending money. This emphasis on exchange (including by a shifting cultural norm of all US women working full-time over the past few decades) has lead to increasing precarity for most US American families including through "The Two Income Trap":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Warren and Tyagi call stay-at-home mothers of past generation
Re:AI & robotic worker outcome. (Score:4, Informative)
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For my entire life (Gen X) they've been predicting what a Utopia society will turn into when the robots do everything
Asimov addressed that issue in his Foundation Series. A planet populated by a few remaining people who had no need for human contact. And were repelled by it. Moribund would be the best description of their society.
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Self-driving is not an AI problem. It is automation. The research for it has been running for something like 50 years now and it will eventually produce automation that can deal with most things required. Just like a regular driver but more dependable and no crap like road-rage.
The problem is that many jobs contain large parts that do not require understanding or insight. Up to now, these parts could have been automated, but creating the systems for that would have been prohibitively expensive. Generative A
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Nope. What gets automated is administrative stuff. Nobody needs more of that and the increased profits will just go into a small number of pockets and that is it.