Tech CEOs Call for a Universal Basic Income. But What are the Alternatives? (yahoo.com) 153
The Washington Post looks at arguments that "AI's coming upheaval may demand massive infusions of cash to everyday Americans". But they also look at some of the alternatives:
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for similar public-relief measures, including, potentially, universal basic income, or UBI. Eventually "our current economic setup will no longer make sense," he wrote in a blog post, adding that "there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized."
Though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once championed universal basic income, he has since embraced a new structure where the public has "collective ownership" of aspects of AI, according to Business Insider. "I think any version of the future that I can get really excited about means that everybody's got to participate in the upside," he said in a recent podcast interview. In April, OpenAI laid out a set of policy proposals aiming to address the coming upheaval, referencing the transition to the industrial age and the New Deal as points of comparison for what's on the horizon...
But some experts question whether tech billionaires, who spent decades resisting regulation, unions and higher taxes, would support the kind of massive redistribution such programs would require. "The only way to pay for UBI is to massively tax those enormously rich people who own the UBI machines," said Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California at Berkeley who served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. "It's a nice surprise to hear Elon Musk advocating for that...." Rothstein co-authored a study in 2019 that estimated granting a small income to the entire country would cost a massive amount — nearly double the total spending of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. To issue payments of $12,000 a year to U.S. adults, for example, "would require nearly doubling federal tax revenues," according to the paper...
Economists appear to broadly support other solutions beyond redistribution, such as job retraining. A working paper published this spring by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago showed economists support more narrowly tailored solutions to the economic disruption. In late April, Meta appeared to embrace that path, announcing "a multi-year initiative that provides free, rapid training to turn thousands of Americans with no prior experience into high-paid fiber technicians" for projects including data centers.
Key quotes from the article:
Though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once championed universal basic income, he has since embraced a new structure where the public has "collective ownership" of aspects of AI, according to Business Insider. "I think any version of the future that I can get really excited about means that everybody's got to participate in the upside," he said in a recent podcast interview. In April, OpenAI laid out a set of policy proposals aiming to address the coming upheaval, referencing the transition to the industrial age and the New Deal as points of comparison for what's on the horizon...
But some experts question whether tech billionaires, who spent decades resisting regulation, unions and higher taxes, would support the kind of massive redistribution such programs would require. "The only way to pay for UBI is to massively tax those enormously rich people who own the UBI machines," said Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California at Berkeley who served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. "It's a nice surprise to hear Elon Musk advocating for that...." Rothstein co-authored a study in 2019 that estimated granting a small income to the entire country would cost a massive amount — nearly double the total spending of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. To issue payments of $12,000 a year to U.S. adults, for example, "would require nearly doubling federal tax revenues," according to the paper...
Economists appear to broadly support other solutions beyond redistribution, such as job retraining. A working paper published this spring by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago showed economists support more narrowly tailored solutions to the economic disruption. In late April, Meta appeared to embrace that path, announcing "a multi-year initiative that provides free, rapid training to turn thousands of Americans with no prior experience into high-paid fiber technicians" for projects including data centers.
Key quotes from the article:
- Elon Musk said in an X post that "Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI."
- "I think it's a marketing tactic" responded Scott Santens, a universal basic income advocate and is CEO of the nonprofit Income to Support All Foundation. He argued to the Washington Post that Musk's comment is "trying to thread this needle of, 'I want to solve this stuff that will potentially put a lot of people out of work.' And how do you avoid people getting really [angry] at that? Okay, well, you're still going to get money, everything will be great it's just you won't have to work anymore...."
- The article also cites a recent commentary from Jay W. Richards, a senior research fellow and VP of social and domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation. "The new AI prophets of doom suffer from a failure of imagination. They simply cannot envision what work the future will bring, so they conclude it will bring none,"
It's a scary future (Score:5, Interesting)
We are in an economic system based on ownership, with an ever-shrinking group of people owning an ever-growing percentage of things and making everyone else rent from them.
As labor is replaced by AI and robots, more and more people will exist who are not needed in this economic model, and while there's no need for a few people to own everything... they're not going to give it up.
UBI is a stop-gap. It still leaves a small hereditary capital class in control, because they will be the ones in charge of who gets UBI and how much. Because it will not be 'universal' in distribution.
We can't dial back human labor, because we're heading for a time when so little human labor is required that an individual share wouldn't be practical.
We're still going to have scarcity - you're going to want a place to live, you're going to need energy to power things, you're going to need a share of resources to have those things produced for you. There is no 'post-scarcity' on these fronts.
Re: It's a scary future (Score:3, Interesting)
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Musks wealth will certainly transfer to his kids (85 of them)
I assume that's a projected figure, but I suppose it could be that high already. Haven't really been paying attention.
Re: It's a scary future (Score:5, Interesting)
Extreme wealth transfers to immortal corporate entities frequently enough. 100 years from now there will still be a Meta and Alphabet. Or a company that acquired them both.
Re: It's a scary future (Score:5, Insightful)
Extreme wealth and power turn over quickly in the US. It’s one of our many strengths that few people discuss. Multimillionairre families are a dime a dozen. But, once you get above a billion dollars, it’s almost impossible for a US family to sit on a pile of wealth and power for centuries unless multiple generations of the family are truly extraordinary. Which basically never happens. “Regression to the mean” is almost imevitable.
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“Reversion to the mean”
is probably what you meant.
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You and hdyoung are both right. [wikipedia.org]
Re: It's a scary future (Score:3)
Most of these big companies were split up due to political will. That will has pretty much disappeared, and in the best case is a 'stop your monopoly abuse for a few years' such as what happened to Microsoft when they pushed Internet Explorer.
There are plenty of companies that abuse their dominant positions and the only way they get corrected is if a new technology displace them.
For cable tv, Comcast is getting displaced by streaming, but they still have plenty of localized monopoly for cable internet acce
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Most of those big companies were indeed split up by political will, but likewise reigned over industries that barely exist any longer anyway.
Microsoft, Amazon, space x/Tesla, etc are not only the largest firms, they exist in industries that themselves weren't really even imagined 50y ago.
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Part of my point about buying direct from China is that if a manufacturer is going to mistreat me by selling me subpar products made in China for more money and give me poor customer service, I'm not going to reward them anymore with my dollars. I'll buy from the source directly and there I do not expect good customer service, but if I do I'll be pleasantly surprised instead of being upset.
I had quality issues with LG appliances and customer service that 'pretended' to care and help, but did not help. So wh
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Based on what?
None of these companies really existed AT ALL much more than a decade ago.
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https://reclaimfinance.org/sit... [reclaimfinance.org]
"ExxonMobil’s diversification strategy remains marginal and partly relies on gas and unsustainable energies"
https://www.clientearth.org/pr... [clientearth.org]
ExxonMobil reportedly spent just 0.2% of its capital expenditure on sources of low-carbon energy like wind and solar.
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If you have something, show it. No facts, you don't matter.
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Your link is embarrasing to your side of the argument. The article plainly states that oil companies are increasing their carbon footprint and seeking out new sources for oil and gas, despite their efforts at "decarbonization" (which I suspect are perfunctory) and a projected drop in demand for oil. Here are the three "take-away" bold-points just below the article's headline:
And yet you claimed above that "Exxon has not been an oil company since the 1970s" and "they've done massive renewable R&D." Where
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85 kids!? Whachew sayin? Is he some kind of a perpetual oscillating pelvic pendulum?
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This is a common myth that's often repeated because it's useful, in business for wealth advisors scaring their clients into retaining their services, and in fiscally conservative politics to promote indefinite patience with the ever-worsening moral horror show produced by runaway inequality.
https://www.oakswealthmanageme... [oakswealthmanagement.com]
https://jamesgrubman.com/wp-co... [jamesgrubman.com]
I remember there was a study in the 2010s that found that it takes something like 900 years for a wealthy family to lose its wealth but all my search atte
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You're only doing first derivative prediction, aka "what if everything stays exactly the same, but this one single thing changes?" The real world operates in cause-effect, force-feedback, action-reaction modes. In other words "what if one single thing changes, how will everything change to adapt and exploit the change?"
With an ever growing number of unhappy and poor residents whose time is free from the constraints of working a job, new possibilities emerge to cannibalize the system. The usual single phra
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The Fine Details (Score:5, Insightful)
AI CEOs love grandstanding about universal basic income to ‘offset’ the jobs their tech is vaporizing, but they’re conveniently silent on where the actual dollars come from once the human tax base is gone. Print more money? Good luck with that hyperinflation party. Tax the AI instead? Sure—except now every instance gets valued and levied exactly like an employed human, turning your silicon savior into a fiscal equivalent of the worker it replaced. Congrats, geniuses: you’ve just made AI ‘cost’ as much as it ‘saves.’ Who’s really getting UBI’d here—the displaced coders or the trillion-dollar models?
Re:The Fine Details (Score:5, Insightful)
Company scrip. You'll swear fealty to a Tech Bro, and in return you'll get scrip you can spend on whatever their empire produces. They will control what is available and how much of it you can have.
They want to be gods on Earth.
Eventually, they're going to realize they don't need 8 billion people consuming energy and resources when they can sustain their lifestyle with a few thousand people and a few billion robots, and then things get very sad for a while.
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Eventually, they're going to realize they don't need 8 billion people consuming energy and resources when they can sustain their lifestyle with a few thousand people and a few billion robots, and then things get very sad for a while.
Who will be thinned though? Will the guillotine come back?
Re:The Fine Details (Score:5, Insightful)
Does Musk or Altman really need trillions of $$? How long would that last if you took the top $990 billion and used it to fund UBI? Maybe all the money stored in offshore banks could be used to help fund it.
If something like UBI isn't figured out, there won't be a point to the economy... AI takes over all jobs, AI-controlled factory makes widget, AI-controlled truck delivers widgets to store, nobody can afford widget anymore, what's the point of factory making widget? AI outfits can't make money, the owners of the outfits don't make any more money, everyone starves and dies off.
Retraining only works if you retrain all the people who lost their jobs to AI in an area that AI won't take, which means you'll have 1/2 the population trained as fiber-optic installers... and, how often do you need that much fiber run, and the other half trained as AI technicians (the guys who troubleshoot the damn thing) when t he building only has room for like two humans in it.
Sure, retrain for one of these remaining jobs, hope you have your driver's license and a vehicle to get to the data center 150 miles away.
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$990B divided by 200M people is a whopping $4950 each. Don't spend it all in one place.
The point is that they spend it. When money is spent, it doesn't evaporate. It induces work. That work produces value. Then the money is spent again, and again, until it winds up in the pockets of the rich. The rich are sitting on historically unprecedented cash reserves, and interest rates are high so people aren't borrowing it from the banks where the funds are held. Therefore the money is just sitting around doing nothing, and not inducing any work. The proposal is to pry this money out of the coffers of
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Of course, don't do it as one lump sum, and you forgot to figure in all the money stashed off-shore that should go toward UBI.
Perhaps you'd rather we don't get a UBI, and we go back to the stone age where we can't even afford a blanket to keep us warm, and live off of whatever animal walks into the "new and proved" somewhat sharp stick.
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Does Amazon have to be worth a trillion dollars while nobody can afford to buy a bar of soap?
Tough for them... I'm sure someone will still be making soap, while humans are still around.
Remember, AI is taking jobs, so without some kind of backup income to afford stuff, me and you and the Dachshund in the corner are going to starve (probably the dog later as it can eat our bodies).
Nobody is immune to this... it affects everyone.
There won't be any divesting or people left to notice it... what Golden Goose?
Welc
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Sure, they *SAY* that they care, but we already know that they do not.
My response to their request for UBI would be to ask how many workers they expect to lose to AI, and ask what the average salary is of those workers. Then, add 25% (because, you know, billionaire CEOs are also liars), Multiply, and then tax the co
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Why would there be inflation? Inflation happens when you print more money than you have production. If AI ends up being so wonderfully productive then you'll have to print money like mad to avoid deflation. If it ends up being so productive nobody has to work then you have the classic post-scarcity economy a la Star Trek, and we'll probably abandon money because it's silly.
Is that a realistic possibilty? Who knows. What is ridiculous is all the "OMG it's going to be so awful people won't have to spend half
Yep, "marketing tactic" it is. (Score:5, Insightful)
Assholes like Musk will never be willing to pay more taxes for something like this. People like him can never get enough. Hence he and others try to keep people quiet with "you will be cared for" until it becomes impossible to hide that this is a lie, but it will be too late to really do anything.
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He has to because who would buy his product if nobody has any money?
The good news is you can keep playing and winning at monopoly even if you land on Luxury Tax once in a while.
Re:Yep, "marketing tactic" it is. (Score:4, Insightful)
if the super-rich won't fund something like UBI, the majority of people die off
no, people won't just "die off". open a history book. it won't be nice.
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Indeed.
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That moron? Visionaire? What are you smoking?
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Soo, and the kids are responsible and need to suffer for their parent's decision? You are one special repulsive asshole.
Translation (Score:2)
he has since embraced a new structure where the public has "collective ownership" of aspects of AI,
What he means is that he's "borrowed" too much money from VCs, and now he hopes the government will give him money.
Not needed (Score:2)
The AI human drones continue to overestimate how AI is going to affect jobs. They will not be firing more than 5% and they will be generating more than that number of jobs in hardware production. Just ask Dell about how many chips they are selling to the AI people.
Humans brains are expensive (approximately 1/2 a million to raise to 18 years old) but the equivalent in chips costs multiple millions.
We are cheaper than the machines.
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I agree, but the problem is the decision makers have already fired far more than that on the hopes of AI making them money .... and to pay for the AI spending ... and future intended AI spending.
All without evidence of any of it paying off.
Once they've wrecked the companies they won't be in a position to hire anyone back.
Great idea in theory (Score:2)
In practice, the details are tricky and details matter.
We need to stop implementing policy open-loop, based on guesses of what the outcome will be.
We need a more accurate economic model that predicts the real world effects of policy changes.
Along with that, we need a procedure in place to measure the effects of policy changes and adjust as necessary.
UBI is the wrong answer. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's simple and self serving, the correct historical answer is to redistribute a shrinking amount of work over the entire workforce, ie a shorter workweek. UBI will create permanent poverty level while maximizing billionaire income.
https://www.scry.llc/2025/01/2... [scry.llc]
Many of these tech CEOs are more ruthless than intelligent. See workweek history here...
https://www.scry.llc/2024/12/2... [scry.llc]
lower full time to 32-35 hours an week and add an (Score:2)
lower full time to 32-35 hours an week and add an X2 or more OT level.
Why do you need money anyway? (Score:2)
Roddenberry didn’t see this one coming
he has since embraced ... (Score:2)
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allthe profits are still going into his pocket, right?"
"collective ownership". LOL!
No such shit is going to happen (Score:2)
These companies want to scare you and me to the bone for fun. The truth is, they cannot survive without you and me onboarding their AI platform.
You cannot have 1 acre of grass land support 1000 herbivores, which in turn support 10000 carnivores. Because energy from the sun goes to the grass, a small fraction of which goes to the herbivores, a small fraction of which goes to the carnivores. So, for every 100 herbivores only 1 carnivore can survive.
Same with the flow of money in an economy. If something has t
alternatve (Score:2)
The alternative is universal basic work.
Re: alternatve (Score:2)
Of course (Score:2)
They want UBI - the govmt to deal with the impoverished masses by giving them a pittance of printed fiat money, while the real wealth concentrates in hands of the oligarchs. That UBI won't come from taxing "the rich" - it will be funded with the destruction of the $USD.
Like passenger pigeons (Score:2)
...for the 'workforce'.
First they'll take away the vote (Score:5, Interesting)
Then they'll introduce autocracy.
Then they'll offer free euthanasia.
Then they'll offer money to die with dignity.
Then they'll return to draconian (The real kind) law, where every infraction, misdemeanor, or felony is punishable by death (See Larry Niven's Sci-fi stories for an example of this.)
Then they'll eliminate retirement income and heath care subsidies. This will force most retirees to choose either crime (Punishable by death) or Euthanasia.
Then they'll euthanize anybody who is not productive.
In the end, the population could shrink to 1/10000 of what it is now (800 million).
There is no way UBI will ever be supported. The core people in power will never let it happen. The reasoning is: Why feed people who don't contribute to the interests of the corporations or government.
Try first... (Score:2)
...with Universal Basic Healthcare.
Anthropic has a history of hyping scary AI (Score:2)
Mythos is "too powerful to release." AI is so effective it will cause mass unemployment. Those are two claims of the same feather.
Put another way, "Our AI is so powerful it's scary."
AI is powerful. It will replace some jobs, and over time, probably a lot of jobs. But it's not magic. Lots of companies are now finding out that when they trust AI to do important things, it isn't very trustworthy.
Like all automation technologies, AI will take the easy tasks first. The harder ones will be much more expensive and
Even if AI is as scary as claimed (Score:2)
UBI still doesn't work, from an economic point of view.
We can't even find the will to balance the US budget *now*. Why on earth does anybody think we can add another huge government expense, that dwarfs current spending, and succeed?
The Big Lie (Score:2)
The big lie is that everything that needs to be built is being built by big tech.
Meanwhile, we need nuclear power plants to keep up with massive growth in electricity demands.
We need desalination plants and people to dump salt in the middle of the ocean to replenish water in local ecosystems.
Those are just two obvious things.
We also need the arts, and more people reading books.
Capitalists only care about the profit in their own silo. The oligarchs are preventing more silos from being built.
That is why you
Make them dependent (Score:2)
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Yep. Make us all goldfish in an aquarium.
Universal Basic Income IS the Alternative... (Score:2)
Feudalism->Capitalism->Feudalism its seems.
Musk.... (Score:3)
That would assume that Musk pays taxes and is not getting billions OFF the government.
All the corporate welfare would have to go...
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How could UBI possibly help in this? (Score:2)
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Because then they'll have to hide in their New Zealand bunkers just to avoid personal violence. Do you think that's the preferred future for the Elon Musks of the world, to hide in a bunker just to avoid sharing 10% of your wealth?
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Who do you think is going to build those robots?
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Who do you think is going to build those robots?
In the scenario where Robots produce everything vastly better and cheaper than humans ever could, it would clearly be Robots that build further Robots. Which isn't so Sci-Fi anymore, many modern factories already have automated most of the build process.
Welfare state in the United Kingdom (Score:2)
Or I have a better proposal (Score:2)
Let's do it with wealth redistribution completely and have the people that should be paying taxes pay their taxes. Let's do a flat tax, stop all these loopholes and minimum taxes. It shouldn't be that hard. But the biggest problem is we have a system now where there are two problems. Number one) people are not saving money anymore on the bottom which makes them unwealthy because investing is one of the best ways to accrue wealth. Number two) let's stop making it easy for companies to nickel and dime consume
Universal Basic Employment (Score:2)
Other options: gift, exchange, planned economies (Score:4, Insightful)
As I wrote about in 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-... [pdfernhout.net]
"This article explores the issue of a "Jobless Recovery" mainly from a heterodox economic perspective. It emphasizes the implications of ideas by Marshall Brain and others that improvements in robotics, automation, design, and voluntary social networks are fundamentally changing the structure of the economic landscape. It outlines towards the end four major alternatives to mainstream economic practice (a basic income, a gift economy, stronger local subsistence economies, and resource-based planning). These alternatives could be used in combination to address what, even as far back as 1964, has been described as a breaking "income-through-jobs link". This link between jobs and income is breaking because of the declining value of most paid human labor relative to capital investments in automation and better design. Or, as is now the case, the value of paid human labor like at some newspapers or universities is also declining relative to the output of voluntary social networks such as for digital content production (like represented by this document). It is suggested that we will need to fundamentally reevaluate our economic theories and practices to adjust to these new realities emerging from exponential trends in technology and society."
Or the YouTube video:
"Five Interwoven Economies: Subsistence, Gift, Exchange, Planned, and Theft"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
"This video presents a simplified education model about socioeconomics and technological change. It discusses five interwoven economies (subsistence, gift, exchange, planned, and theft) and how the balance will shift with cultural changes and technological changes. It suggests that things like a basic income, better planning, improved subsistence, and an expanded gift economy can compensate in part for an exchange economy that is having problems."
Re: Other options: gift, exchange, planned economi (Score:2)
Call it heterodox if you want, but our labor participation rate today is closer to where it was before women entered the workforce than it is to our peak.
Re:Great idea (Score:4, Insightful)
How is that different than what President Slush Fund is doing for his band of traitors?
Re: Great idea (Score:5, Informative)
Because they "worked" for their pay. Aka backpay for their part in being part of a crime.
Re:Great idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Give free money for people to sit around and smoke pot all day.
If there are no jobs because AI took them, what do you propose they do instead?
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I'm pretty certain a robot will be able to dig ditches
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You seem to fear a Soviet-style future, with your warnings about "planned economies" and "a central committee." I don't want such a thing either, but I don't see anyone heading in that direction.
And you seem to think that the answer is to encourage more jobs in the trades, as though they will be immune to the effects of AI. I doubt it. Robotics are advancing steadily. Put AI on board, and trades aren't safe either.
I'm not saying I have an answer either. But I think one thing we must face as a species is tha
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Give free money for people to sit around and smoke pot all day.
There are around 50M retired people in the USA at the moment. Of course some of them are impoverished, so let's for the sake of argument say that 75%-ish are not.
So that's 38M retired people.
Do they sit around and smoke pot all day?
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I, for one, hate pot, and don't have a game console newer than my first-gen Sega Genesis (still have it, needs a power adapter).
The smoking pot all day is courtesy of legalizing pot, and maybe soon, 'shrooms. Can't wait for that one... people walking around trippin' all the time.
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You can tell the one they quoted in the summary is full of crap because he's concocted this new phrase "universal HIGH INCOME" (his capitals). Dude sounds like your average scammer with guaranteed returns who's going to make you rich. It also shows how completely out-of-touch he is. People want a roof over their heads, a sensible vehicle, clean edible food, a decent school for their kids. The one who cares about "HIGH INCOME" is the tech bro.
What's attractive about UBI is that it preserves as much as possib
Re:Bad For Us (Score:5, Interesting)
The whole notion of a universal income is the stupidest idea in the entire history of stupid ideas.
It is not. The main arguments "against" it are ones based on misunderstanding of what it is. Viz:
when your income is dictated by Government.
My man, what do you think UBI actually IS?
The only way the government dictates your income under UBI is if you have none, which is exactly how it is now.
With UBI you get a fixed income from the government regardless of any other income you may or may not make. The idea is generally you replace a lot of the existing benefits (income support, pensions, the whole lot) which have to be applied for, administered, policed for fraud and etc with UBI, and you then bump the taxes a bit so people earning some target income basically see no net change, thereby ensuring that you don't just print money, and the overall change to tax receipts vs money spent is basically zero.
An interesting follow on is that you could shift from the somewhat complex tax system to a flat tax system effectively without leaving behind progressive taxation.
Another interesting follow on is you may be able to entirely scrap minimum wage and its enforcement.
Will it actually work in practice? Who knows, but currently governments are jumping through a lot of expensive hoops to achieve outcomes which mathematically drop out naturally from UBI and flat tax.
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You're taking about orthogonal things.
UBI usher much different from what could claim in unemployment, housing benefits etc is Tue not working already. It doesn't preclude investment of the dirty your taking about. Most people aren't content not working, and aren't content with the minimum.
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As a proud leftist I must ask what the fuck you're talking about.
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Look at car factories... did they go back to employing more people after the robot arms/automation failed?
The AI crap isn't going to go away... they'll keep refining it until it's perfect.
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The whole notion of a universal income is the stupidest idea in the entire history of stupid ideas.
It might work. I might not. But it is a possible solution to a problem that we have no idea how to fix, and there aren't many other solutions being floated about.
If you think the problem starts and ends with LLMs, then you're fooling yourself. This is about automation, and LLMs are just a part of that. What do we do when we have fully autonomous trucks? Do you know how many people depend on truck driving for a decent income? We're already working on having robots unload those trucks, manage warehouses, etc.
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"It's a possible solution to a problem we have no idea how to fix"... that's accurate, and is probably the most charitable way to describe UBI. Except I would have phrased it as "a farfetched but technically feasible solution".
What you're ultimately talking about is a centrally planned economy... actual communism, in other words. It's an idea that did not make sense in the past but might make sense in some distant and hypothetical Star Trek-like future, where enormous production capacity for all sorts
Re: Bad For Us (Score:2)
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It's not the worst idea ever but it's worse than better options the billionaires want to distract us from with discussion of UBI, like universal basic services and democratic socialism, ideas where they don't retain as much of their wealth and power as they might with UBI.
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Universal basic income only makes sense if there is zero resource scarcity.
This isn't true. All you need is a lot more people than there is work for them to do for it to make sense. We're well past that, and very far into make work for the sake of employment. That's waste, i.e. inefficiency, and therefore worse than UBI because it requires resource consumption to maintain.
Universal Basic Income creates a permanent class tied to government gibs. It will be nothing like Star Trek and a whole lot more like The Expanse.
This is quite possibly true. If we don't learn to work together and control our government rather than having it controlling us, then UBI won't really make things better. It will only change how we are oppressed.
Re:Economic Crash (Score:5, Insightful)
The entire economy is currently in a crashed state.
Errr no, quite the opposite. It is in a bubble pre-crashed. Tell me did you line up for food stamps yesterday? Economic crashes come with wide spread hardships. Yeah fuel prices are high, but beyond that we haven't experienced a crash yet. Aside from a few tech job losses, unemployment is fine, purchasing power is down, but it's only moved a small portion of the population into poverty.
You clearly haven't seen a proper economic crash yet if you think you're in one right now. *checks S&P500* Yep everyone's 401K is still riding high.
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Once AI takes all the jobs, we're all unskilled because unless you got your foot in the door when AI started, you're screwed.
As for the nukes, we'll put an AI in charge of them (WarGames).
Voting for right-wing candidates only is what caused all this? We've been heading ever increasingly fast towards this regardless of who was the Butt In Chair. Also, we don't vote the President or Vice President in... that's the Electoral College that takes care of that chore.
I do fail to see what theology has to do with
You're misunderstanding (Score:3, Interesting)
Theology is a thing because several secular democracies in the world are quickly collapsing into theocratic dictatorships.
This is a problem for the future existence of the human race because the religious extremists being put in charge are completely insane and genuinely believe God will protect them and give them dominion over the Eart
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So, was Harris (left-wing, by your definition), going to fix everything?
Theology has nothing to do with stuff, really, anymore... sure, there's always going to be people who believe they are 'chosen by God' to lead some army or whatever... nationalistic supremacy has nothing to do with theology. Believing that whatever God you believe in is going to protect them from dying when they strap C4 to them and walk into a place of Worship... that's them being nuts.
No religion truly, honestly, says anything about
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But, still... the AI "revolution" has been coming for a while now, and has rapidly picked up pace within the last couple years, and even if it doesn't work _exactly as planned to replace humans_, they'll adjust the jobs a teensy bit and maybe keep a few meat-sacks around to train the AI's more in those areas.
Left-wing, right-wing... they're mostly the same... they push for policies and such that make money for the right people, with Big Oil lining their pockets the whole time.
Hate to break it to you... Harr
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rsilvergun... you don't have to repost the same links endlessly as your alter-ego just so you can't be modded down... we wouldn't mind _not_ seeing them on every topic.
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UBI doesn't work
but
The only way out of this is to have a society that lets people who are effectively useless due to automation have food and shelter and healthcare and transportation and entertainment and it all has to be at least pretty nice. No you can't just shove them all into ghettos like we do with Palestine.
you say people must "have food and shelter and healthcare and transportation and entertainment". sure. but how will people get those without money?
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modded 0, flamebait!? Really? Come on mods you can do better than that! Wish I had mod points about now.
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The only way out of this is to have a society that lets people who are effectively useless due to automation have food and shelter and healthcare and transportation and entertainment and it all has to be at least pretty nice. No you can't just shove them all into ghettos like we do with Palestine.
The problem is that doesn't feel fair or right. Why does your ass have to get up at 6:00 in the morning and drag your ass into work. It's especially bad because the people who are going to get to stay home and play Xbox get to do that specifically because they are unskilled, stupid and useless.
Maybe a system where everyone gets a share of collective productivity but has to take a turn at work could make those people feel better. So everyone gets their lifetime supply of food/shelter/healthcare/transportation/entertainment in return for their 5-10 years working or whatever the economy actually needs, so there's no shortage of human labor and nobody feels that there's an unfair division of labor either.
Of course the problem with that is another problem contributing to the current situation, there a
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We used to have EDDs (etc) which companies could inform of their job openings, and people could go to them and find out about opportunities that matched their backgrounds. These evolved into places to get help with resumes and searches for jobs, but not with job listings themselves. While those are clearly needed functions, having a trusted source of job listings with a legal obligation not to needlessly disclose information about you to third parties was also valuable.
At least with a government program the
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What jobs?
There won't be any, except for like 400-600 technicians who replace failed harddrives and blow the dust off the server racks occasionally... so if you retrain 200 million people to do that tech job, you still end up with the same job.
https://underthehardhat.org/ai... [underthehardhat.org] -- give it another year, and it'll be AI-controlled robots working on your car, plowing snow, teaching the kids at daycare, giving you flu shots and doing surgery... who needs those pesky meat-sacks to do jobs slower than a robot can