No plausible UBI system gives people so much money than they can relax and order food delivery while they watch all of their entertainment from their paid subscriptions.

Funding UBI is extremely hard. We would have to more than double our tax intakes to even begin to give a reasonable UBI as a social survival safety net, even if we consider eliminating all other social services.

UBI isn't a life of luxury and food delivery. It's a roof over your head and enough to afford groceries.

It's also confusing that this article thinks the wealthy are going to eliminate all the jobs and then ask to have their taxes raised so the money can be recirculated back to the people to spend on companies. Where do they think the UBI money is going to come from? Or do they believe that UBI is a money faucet that produces new money?

The same could be said about environmental concerns. It'll be a lot cheaper to deal with today than deal with when it becomes a problem, but its easier to ignore that and collect the cash from oil and gas whilst its going

It is incredibly naive to think that the way things currently are is the way things will be. There is significant reason to believe that after enough concentration of power, there would be no reason for them to continue to participate in traditional economics as we know them.

On the bright side, history shows us that powerful people tend to concentrate power up to the point in which they start to believe themselves as some sort of god-like being. At which point they are reliably proven they are not. The Sword of Damocles hangs above all of them.

Some people will be able to reskill find new work and others won’t and will struggle. Entire communities may disappear or fall into poverty.

The rise of AI does not mean that everyone will lose their jobs and the economy will collapse. That is an utter fallacy.

It's important to ask two questions: - What happens to the workers? - What happens to the capital?

For the first category, it's obvious. The workers lose their jobs. For the second category, the author and many others are under the presumption that the added value of the new added efficiency simply goes into some sort of hemetically sealed vault. That's not how the economy works at all.

The wealth goes to investors, who put it in banks. The banks lend out the money to get a return on investment. The added value must circulate in the economy. The workers do not need to get the money at all to make it circulate. In fact, even today, the majority of wealth is held by the investors/capitalists (many of whom are also the workers).

It's actually the investors who get to decide what to do with the capital. And the most obvious target is EVEN MORE AUTOMATION. Once white collar work is automated, then blue collar work with robotics. Once robotics is automated, then increasing amounts of capital will go to ever diminishing returns on R&D -> fundamental science.

During this process, the educated worker economy and billions of capital will spread like plasmodium fungus into every unoccupied crag and niche in the economy not yet touched by AI to basically add more AI. Investors will necessarily pour billions of dollars into things like robotics, biomedical research, and much more. As new machines come online, millions of jobs will be created, but at the same time millions of jobs will be created to aid the process along b/c for a long time there will be jobs that machines cannot do as we are in the process of doing the R&D and manufacturing for those machines.

These are all overall good things for the world.

By the end of the process, from which we would expect massive massive inequality, the overall standard of living may still be massively improved for the majority of people who do not contribute to this process, and ever more improved to the minority of people who are still involved in the AI based production economy.

No, it can and will get so, so much worse.

I want you to imagine, if you will, the homeless equivalent of the United States environmental health concern prior to the formation of the EPA.

Except instead of thick pollution and dumping toxic waste straight into bodies of water, the most populated cities and towns will go from heavy constant homelessness to overwhelming South American poverty and waves and waves of homelessness everywhere.

This idea that no one will have jobs is sophomoric. People will have jobs. Fewer of them will. And you won’t be able to drive from one master planned neighborhood to another without filled, stolen shopping carts and homeless encampments and the police will turn from law enforcement into neighborhood protection and homelessness deterrents.

And then you’ll see it more, and more. And then paradoxically you’ll see more illegal immigration because despite how bad it is, Americans have no idea how bad it is south of the border and how much worse it can get.

You’ll go to the grocery store and the places you grew up will now lock up their inventory.

Some businesses will shutter and others will take their place that cost more or are more upscale to account for corporate rent that never goes down, and you’ll think your neighborhood is getting better but it’s just becoming more bisected.

You’ll wake up one day, and owning a house will become a luxury that will take you a lifetime to get on the first rung of the ladder. And then you’ll realize that this the first step to bisecting the k-shaped economy.

Your friends who are older than you with garages full of tools who have other friends with garages full of tools who help each other and don’t have to spend 5 figures for a remodel for common labor that pays $250/hr per laborer versus your job which pays out $150/hr per tech worker are the new upper middle class.

And young people will look around at this and accept it and do nothing.

And it will get worse and worse and worse a little at a time for years on end until you ask yourself how much more you can cut out of your budget.

And if you don’t have the cash to weather the storm, you’ll find yourself on the other end of the K.

producer => provider => consumer.

What happens when providers are the gateway for the providers and consumers? When the providers own the market place for both producers and consumers?

1. A producer grows a potato 2. The provider buys the potato for $0.10 3. The provider sells the potato to the consumer for $600.00

This is the system we have now. The wealth goes to the corporations and wealthy stock owners. $599.90. Well, okay, they end up paying $.90 for packaging and to buy politicians.

The number of people who can afford a potato gets smaller and smaller, so fewer and fewer potatoes are sold. For more and more money. Because there is so little demand for potatoes, then potato growers have excess capacity so they get paid less and less. They go out of business.

Is this a problem? What are the long term effects? Guess we will find out.

The circular trade deals we see during the AI boom where companies basically pass around the same pile of cash to each other and grow their valuations is a preview of what’s to come. They are normalizing a world of less consumers.

Wealthy people and corporations will just pass money to each other back and forth through deals and contracts. The underclass will be shut out.

NGMI companies will fight for scraps from these poor underclass consumers, until they ultimately starve.

The world will just be left with big megacorps and their machines. Wealthy titans will digitize their souls and keep their image alive in perpetuity, long after their body has decayed to bones.

> modern citizens under this system are freed from work only to be permanently trapped as captive consumers.

Wat? Trapped in what? This makes zero sense to me.

> The real issue is not whether machines will take our jobs, but why we should accept a system where we only exist to pass cash back to tech corporations.

What is the proposed alternative? The (rather bad) alternative I see is no UBI and let the masses starve...

Wouldn't UBI be funded by the wealth generated by the automation in this case? So is the difference only the amount people receive that changes UBI from an economic cushion to sharing the wealth?

In addition the premise that everyone will be fired is a little presumptuous to me. So far we've seen that agents are very capable of automating well-scoped, verifiable tasks but the majority of jobs don't consist of those

Thank you for letting me in!

Sol Roth

PS:

Hope you like the décor. I’m redecorating your thoughts permanently.

This is the reality we lived in already pre-AI.

Why You Don't Matter Anymore (Economically Speaking) https://youtu.be/T2OHjHPkUzM?si=CNMQLNhs0pkwUsrY

Tl;dw: Most people are already irrelevant to the economy. They are not even needed as consumers anymore because the corporations mostly sell to other corporations and the rich.

But yeah, once the buying power dries up, who is left keeping the lights on?

Very optional consumption.

Capital accumulation on the hands of a few and the rest of us won't be able to afford what they offer.

...I think this challenge too will be overcome in some dystopian fashion

There are certain types of AI that will, and they are amazing: weed identification and laser zapping as a replacement for toxic pesticides, for example.

LLMs? I'm skeptical. I think we're in the middle of a mass delusion that stochastic parrot token extruding machine slop somehow equals "productivity".

From what I've seen it's just making the age old "activity over achievement" problem worse, while degrading skills.

One of two things is going to happen. Either we collectively find ways to recognize the limits of these things and use them in appropriate, limited ways or we devolve to Idocracy.

There's a third option that everyone seems to be breathlessly betting on, that the models improve to the point of human reasoning, but that seems like the most improbable outcome to me.

It's a frightening thing to realize that utopian abundance and abject poverty can co-exist in perfect harmony. One does not contradict the other. Heaven and hell are next-door neighbors. If anything, this is the default state of affairs for most civilizations throughout history.

If work can be offloaded to machines and thinking to agents.. there is no need to keep this thing we call society.

Its way way cheaper and faster to build highly guarded enclaves to fance off from worse part of humans.

Ppl at the top dont even think about us as real humans. We are sub spieces to them.

Elyzium is more probable future for us. This or civil war and big reset. Depends who wins.

SpaceX sold lots of xAI capacity to Anthropic.

They don't need us.

The worst part is that they think we're naive. Corporations think we don't know that they're undergoing surveillance through illegal methods. That we are complying because the mafia they hired to curtail unions are precise instead of engaging in widespread fear mongering. I'm so sick of all of this.

Here goes. Our towns and cities need to create our own money supply, especially to survive the coming depression (Both Keynes and Hayek would agree). The vast majority of our money is currently issued by banks, which have exactly the opposite incentives, they will issue less credit and on worse terms the more you need it. In fact the banks love to lend to the ultra-rich (including the guys who pay $0 in taxes and use their shares as collateral, while having their corporations buy back the stocks).

If you want to tinker around the edges, keep using their money. But in a world where AI makes everything cheap, why not have communities roll out their own money, and pay UBI in it? Waiting for the federal government to issue UBI is a fool's errand (not even Nixon was able to get it done, as president, much less someone like Andrew Yang who I supported and built campaign apps for, http://yang2020.app).

The community acts as the source and the sink of the money. And since we don't want to "trust" any given member of the community to operate the database, we need... a blockchain. I know, this is where I will get heavily downvoted for mentioning that (I have a feeling that there is even keyword matching to do it automatically). But... what is the alternative?

https://community.intercoin.app/t/rolling-out-voluntary-basi...

The alternative is that people keep relying on giant corporations to give us jobs, and on giant banks to issue our money supply, while they just siphon more and more money to the rich. But any time someone says "hey, we have the technology to self-organize and serve each other" there are people frothing at the mouth angry at this person. Frankly, towns could build socialist cooperatives for everything, e.g. their own Uber without the shareholder class taking most drivers' salaries. AI makes it easy. But the main thing is making our own money supply, and giving it out as UBI to each citizen to spend on food, robots, etc.

they'll have enough to live the rest of their lives in lux

so why should they care what happens to their former company, or to the plebs

Welch literally destroyed GE and but by then was long gone and laughing his way to the bank; this is just next-level Welch

that's the unfortunate reality

The ultimate goal of these "tech elites" is to concentrate all wealth to one person (themself each) and leave the rest of the people with 0. It's the extreme of capitalism, which by the way is the same as the extreme communism. By advocating an UBI, paid of course by the state, they feel they make us a favour and we should thank them.

Not from so distant past - Soviet Union collapse caused mass unemployment and similar socioeconomic scenarios - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_wild_nineties

Mass poverty and skyrocketing crime levels (mugged for sneakers was common), while ultra rich grabbed money and power.

Humans will be cut off from work and will be on a forever UBI system that you will have to be spending tokens as currency for basic services /s.

If AI can truly replace human labor at a lower price point, then that's more or less the end for your median human. The economy will work by much the same principles as ever: those who can provide value will trade with others who can provide value. If that's not your median human, too bad for them. There may be some initial efforts by government to cushion people's irrelevance with UBI or other welfare schemes, but they won't be stable. Human rights and the political power of the median citizen are historically downstream of the value of the average citizen's labor.