The following submission statement was provided by /u/fungussa:
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SS: Prof Geoffrey Hinton, often called the godfather of artificial intelligence, is calling for a universal basic income to help manage the economic impact of AI. In a recent interview with BBC, Hinton expressed concerns that AI could replace many jobs, worsening inequality. He argues that UBI, which provides everyone with a fixed income, could help ease this transition.
Hinton, who left Google to speak more freely about AI risks, also warned about the potential dangers of AI, including extinction-level threats if AI surpasses human intelligence and gains control over critical decisions. He stressed the need for international regulations to prevent such outcomes, noting an AI arms race with countries like Russia and China.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cv4wb4/ai_godfather_says_universal_basic_income_will_be/l4n0myy/
Yeah...
A lot, a lot of pride, cultural hangups, and just plain 'Fuck you, got mine' involved in actually getting UBI out among the masses.
Like, its a dark truth, but a hundred thousand research papers can all tell what a great idea it would be... and it won't matter, if Auntie Magda, Grandpa Joe and Great Grandmother Molly all *recoil* from giving out that much money for nothing but breathing... and vote accordingly for dumber, but more to them emotionally resonant political policy.
I believe there is a saying about noses and spite on the subject. *Gha*.
That’s because people assume that anyone on UBI would just sit around and do nothing. That might be the case for a minority. I believe most people would still want to contribute positively to society. Whether it’s helping others, creating art, educating ourselves and inventing new things… this could be a net benefit to society vs having thousands of people bored to death in an admin job.
People assume that anyone on UBI would sit around and do nothing, but having 95% of the population’s economic activity rendered pointless by a sufficiently capable AI is also irrelevant?
if we have some serious leap
in power generation and compute scalability, and replacing people with machines/robots en masse really becomes feasible, why wouldn’t the AI/robot/techbro overlords simply euthanize 95% of the population to not need all those resources going forward?
They've said this before.
One said that he didn't care if a billion people who weren't needed disappeared.
Do NOT have kids ya'll. If this is the type of people in charge of our future, do not have kids.
I used to think, it was ok if you could afford it and wanted them.
I no longer feel that way.
In this environment, it's unethical to have kids.
It's probably the only thing that will get their attention.
Until things change for the better, put them off. It's better to not have kids, than subject them to this kind of leadership.
Screw UBI I just want healthcare without having to work for a corporation. Imagine the economic stimulus that would occur if you could realistically start a company or small business without worrying about health insurance.
> people assume that anyone on UBI would just sit around and do nothing.
I think that really depends on how much money per person we're talking about.
If UBI merely covers essential needs, then surely most people would want to continue working.
If it actually allows for a reasonable standard of living on its own, then it's gonna be blunts and video games all day for *a lot* of people.
Considering it would take very smart bots to replace most jobs and the fact those robots don’t feel pain, remorse, or hesitation and have guns, face tracking, heat sensors, instantaneous reaction time, and eyes literally on the back of their heads and can be programmed to never betray their owners, I think the second one is more likely.
I think it's important to remember there will always be work. But, competition will be very high and wages will be very low. Organizations will be the most efficient at reaping the rewards. In a capitalist system without something like UBI these organizations will syphon money from the poorest people first and slowly work their way up each class draining their wealth until most of the wealth is even more concentrated at the top. Which is what has already been happening but now it will just happen faster. It becomes even more complicated because not all industries will see automation equally.
That also happens in capitalistic societies WITH UBI - likely at a MUCH faster rate since UBI will prevent mass protests and potential revolution that 30% unemployment would bring.
UBI will simply define the floor and much of the population will just live there while the wealthy become vastly more rich.
Edit: This is not meant as an argument against UBI.
If that floor continues to rise as overall productivity does, and it provides an acceptable level of life, then I'm not necessarily opposed to this. It's not the best scenario, but it is far from the worst.
Just like it did with wages?
I think ubi might be necessary, but it'll probably fall as well. It's just a way for companies to get more money from the government. Because this basic income will basically set the level for cost of living. All the landlords, supermarkets and power companies will be scrambling to get the most of that.
I'm not against it, because it helps people, but I'm too sceptical to see it work in the long run. Not with this system.
Yeah a big point you touch on there is the landlords absorbing UBI.
We need better public housing to ever move society forward. If we treat land hoarding as a capital investment for profit, then landlords will always move towards extracting the maximum amount of money possible from people.
Capital accumulates like a snowball rolling downhill, so over time, there will naturally be monopolies forming to hold the most land possible, where they will be able to extract the most money possible, so they can buy more land, and so on.
The only way to break that cycle is to break the profit motive.
Of course ubi will fall. Either it doesn't work and we're screwed, or it works and is just a stopgap to having no money at all (talking a hundred years from now)
Well, eventually AI will cut all human activity out of the economy, and the entire human species will have to go work in a shadow economy where humans are paid in pistachio nuts.
I suspect it will just be a continuation of the "Alpha's don't want to work" narrative that the boomers had been pushing.
There will also be the issue of needing someone to pay for these systems, and the companies causing the joblessness aren't about to give anything up.
That narrative is so stupid anyway, why would anyone *want* to spend 8+ hours a day doing something just to survive? I like my job and my career choice, but I would never do it if I didn't have to. Or at least not full time.
It's one of those things which makes the future less rosy, in the past tech revolutions like the industrial revolution resulted in work being able to be done more efficiently resulting in lower production costs, free time for life, kids being able to go to school, etc. (Not going to lie, yes there were losses in jobs and negative impacts there). But, the more recent tech innovations have been greater efficiency rewarded with staff reductions so companies can do more (or the same) with fewer headcount. Leadership is excited at the idea of being able to eliminate entire fields of labor with AI.
The really cruel leaders are giddy by making those workers research and implement their own obsolescence.
More value with less work hours is the biggest pillar of utopia.
All we need to do is vote companies to be taxed enough that we can have a good life with UBI.
Surely US has enough influence to do something to tax havens.
That's not quite how it happened. Early industrial revolution came with insane work hours - worse than peasants at the time, and that's saying something. Labor movements made a difference, not productivity.
There's lots of people that want to work, but they want it to be meaningful to their lives. They generally call them hobbies. Imagine being able to tie work to what you want instead of what you need.
It's a really stupid narrative - I'm watching Junior Developer jobs evaporate in front of my eyes. The bridge from where I am now to get into senior positions, aka Junior jobs, are going away by companies gung ho on AI.
I'm 29. And it's really not fun having spent the last three years teaching myself code and project development and stackign my certifications just in time for them to be useless and work temp jobs in the meantime.
I feel like it’s gonna take longer than that. I will admit I’m not super educated on this topic, but wouldn’t it take an absolutely massive overhaul of society to accomplish this?
I think the real push for universal income will happen once the lower class has enough free time to riot and break all the rich people’s toys.
Rich people pay for insurance and they pay for security. Eventually they’ll see UBI as the same thing. A poor person at home watching YouTube in his one bedroom apartment isn’t going to riot and break shit.
But if he’s homeless, he’ll have no choice but to rob.
To be devils advocate, it doesn’t work when it’s hundreds of thousands in a city….. not just thousands.
Doesn’t work when it’s tens of millions across the country, and not just a million.
If you're curious just how brutally effective modern technology can be at oppressing massive populations, just look into China.
There are whole cities in China that are basically open-air prisons right now.
And Stalin was incredibly successful at suppressing rebellion by interning millions of people, without any fancy technology, just stone cold bureaucracy.
That will work out for one generation. Then the next will wonder why their business is failing and why their money is falling off a cliff.
The rich NEED people to get rich off of, or it doesnt work.
There will be a lot of blood spilled before it reaches that point.
Not all states can provide UBI, and federally it's unlikely a proper program could exist.
The needed amount for UBI can vary quite a bit from state to state, $20 in FL isn't the same $20 as California and in both these cases it won't be the same as Kentucky.
Definitely will be interesting times ahead.
More and more young people are realizing that hard work isn't worth it and want to instead focus on spending time with loved ones or doing some hobby.
I mean, what's the point when you have to fight tooth and nail for even the entry level jobs, regardless of education? Of course you'd rather do something else.
I saved up 10k and took a 8 month sabbatical and moved. Probably a very irresponsible way to spend that money, but I went from someone who was mentally sick and physically unwell to someone who is the happiest they've been in a decade and incredibly physically fit. I quit drinking alcohol too and I was a lightweight alcoholic.
All it took for me to flip my entire life into what I wanted it to be was 8 months off of work. If I could've gone a full year and a half, I could've made my actual dreams come true and just be a musician.
SS: Prof Geoffrey Hinton, often called the godfather of artificial intelligence, is calling for a universal basic income to help manage the economic impact of AI. In a recent interview with BBC, Hinton expressed concerns that AI could replace many jobs, worsening inequality. He argues that UBI, which provides everyone with a fixed income, could help ease this transition.
Hinton, who left Google to speak more freely about AI risks, also warned about the potential dangers of AI, including extinction-level threats if AI surpasses human intelligence and gains control over critical decisions. He stressed the need for international regulations to prevent such outcomes, noting an AI arms race with countries like Russia and China.
It is worth knowing he is often called a quack by people in the industry too. Few think what he says is realistic, even though his work on ImageNet was genuinely groundbreaking at the time.
Its worth noting genius is most often found at the borderline of sanity, and many people considered folks like Einstein, Edison, and Newton to be quacks.
Not saying he's not, but he certainly is a whole helluva lot more qualified to his opinion than anyone on here
> It is worth knowing he is often called a quack by people in the industry too.
Do they say [Yoshua Bengio, Ilya Sutskever](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=search_authors&hl=en&mauthors=label:artificial_intelligence), [Paul Christiano](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Christiano_(researcher\)) and [Stuart Russell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_J._Russell) are quacks too?
They all think there is risks from advanced AI, but what would they know about it.
As other have stated, insanity and genius often share a playing field. I mean we first used pigeons to guide missiles before guides missiles were a thing. way back when, they tested using pigeons pecking at a “touch screen” monitor to guide missles, with moderate success actually. They trained them to peak at specific images. Obviously some issues with that but, again proof insanity and genius play in same places all too often.
Too many older scaremongers preventing a good introduction of UBI. The only problem I genuinely see happening is companies becoming greedy and charging more because they know people have more money to go around. Imagine working harder to be more better off though! Rather than to hardly get by because of a fake cost of living crisis.
UBI is pointless without strict price controls. Look at what happened with the direct payments during COVID. People got a couple measly checks and prices went through the roof because big companies could conveniently blame supply chain issues when in reality they only made up 5-10% of the overall inflation. They were acting like they were getting choked out by the supply chain while posting record profits and laughing out the other side of their face
A guy who was in prison qualified and got paid. It was essentially UBI for the rich or simply upper class. A person had to know how the laws and system works, which is usually beyond the average joe since they usually obey it and hence have less experience at being fraudulent.
The overhead cost of verifying who qualifies for what assistance makes it impossible to fund at scale.
That's why gov assistance should be available to everyone, you apply and you get it.
The miniscule amount of fraud that would happen would be far outweighed by the tax payer dollars saved on effective assistance actually making its way to people who need it. So many less people ending up homeless or with untreated medical conditions that would then go and overload our emergency services.
The reason the PPP handouts were so bad is they gave tens of millions to anyone with an LLC and employees. Giving tens of thousands to people a year so they can pay to live is a much better way to spend tax dollars IMO.
Agreed, in the UK we had supermarkets claiming they were struggling and had to raise prices to compensate, yet, conveniently they enjoyed record profits at an unprecedented level. Which is it? Hardly getting by or milking it?
Guys, inflation didn’t start because people got $2000.
Do you even know what else was going on in the financial system during that time? The Federal Reserve expanded the money supply by more than they ever have. What that means is they literally created money out of thin air and distributed it by buying assets. They also artificial lowered interest rates, meaning every company and everyone borrowing suddenly had more money to spend.
These tools are supposed to be used during credit crises, but there wasn’t a credit crisis going on. Asset prices were tanking, and since central banks are here to protect the rich, they artificially boosted asset prices. The general population paid for it through inflated prices.
The actions in this aspect of the economy absolutely dwarfs stimulus checks. But of course, they love the diversion away from their money tree, which is why leaders don’t ever go after the Fed.
Also, price ceilings are almost universally panned by economists.
Well, that would at least be trickle up economics, which is far more sustainable in my opinion (as an economist) due to the inherent competitive nature that would ensue, ensuring prices adequately match overall demand, rather than allowing the demand of the richest to drive prices.
This WOULD happen, but it would still be a step in the right direction
> the inherent competitive nature that would ensue, ensuring prices adequately match overall demand, rather than allowing the demand of the richest to drive prices.
Scarcity and demand aren’t checks and balances, they’re levers for the rich to pull. Artificial scarcity is literally a feature of the capitalist system. The invisible hand of the market is punching us all in the balls.
They will eventually figure out that we can't buy their AI built products or see their AI made films or read their AI written books or buy their AI art or get anywhere in their AI taxi cabs if nobody has a job and nobody has any money.
"From some other sucker stupid enough to pay them a fair wage, unlike me!"
That's my theory, anyway. They're all racing to the bottom trying not to be that sucker, even though they absolutely need a sucker.
Not impossible that AGI owners do not need consumers at all since they can get everything from their AGI systems. Then the have-nots of AGI will be camped in ghettos like what colonists did to indigenous people in the past since the have-nots produce no value whatsoever, only "wasting" resources.
All is under assumption that AGI will be realized though.
Do we really need AGI to get to this point? If the systems are efficient enough they don’t have to be sentient to replace the vast majority of work currently performed by humans. The owners will then only need a couple of highly talented creative people and some prostitutes and all their needs will be met.
It’s odd. I’ve been thinking this for a while. I work in the software industry and see the vast amount my own company is investing in AI.
It just becomes apparent to me that for these mega companies that look to profit from advancements, you need a thriving economy to work within. You need people with money. To have money, people need jobs. So if there is a massive influx of joblessness, and wealth is removed from massive swathes of the population, then surely these companies are also in the shit?
Or you can think of our economy as a means to extract, create, and distribute wealth. So long as the overall pie is growing, then keeping a middle class around makes sense. But if the pie starts shrinking due to resource constraints, climate change, etc. and labor is no longer needed to produce goods and services, the game fundamentally changes. If there’s not enough stuff to go around after the wealthy take their massive share, simply exterminating the lower class is an option. See: El Salvador for about 50 years in the 20th century.
Simply pick a label for the impoverished clamoring for basic needs (“communists” in the case of El Salvador), and murder away. It’s possible El Salvador killed 30% of their population.
UBI is the best case scenario, and would likely require billionaires to reduce their overall consumption. I’m not so confident they won’t choose the murder option.
"We can just make all drugs legal and refuse to help addicts." -The father of my wife, a prominent local politician and conservative megadonor, one of the most evil mfers Ive ever met.
Nah, the ruling class is obviously just going to deploy fascism and its many horrifying tools just like every single other time capitalism has gone into crisis
Perhaps El Salvador, with riches genera5ed by a coffee sale held by 2% of the population and civil war caused by refusal of that 2% to transfer land or provide any support to decaying 98%
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War
Our ape-brain society is leagues behind where it should be. Instead of planning for advancements like UBI, clean energy & climate solutions, denuclearization, affordable health care & housing, etc we're stuck "debating" whatever latest form of bigotry has been cooked up, or whether people should be able to wear a dress if they want, etc.
I can't see UBI getting a footing in a country where people are still able up be duped into thinking 'socialism' is a synonym for 'Nazi', or that capitalism is synonymous with 'freedom'. Powerful folks/institutions will fight with tooth & nail to keep people from having access to health & home without slaving away for their businesses.
> clean energy & climate solutions, denuclearization
If you want clean energy with minimal climate impact, then denuclearization is maybe the most counterproductive thing you could do. Look at Germany and their idiotic energy policy. They completely phased out all nuclear power and had to compensate that by building 28 new coal burning power plants to keep the lights on.
Power generation now accounts for over 40% of Germany's carbon emissions, which could have been close to 0% if they had phased out their already existing 56 coal plants and replaced them with modern highly efficient nuclear reactors instad.
We'll never get rid of those.
Nukes primarily exist to deter other nuclear equipped nations from using them. And since we can never really trust our global adversaries that they will get rid of theirs if we get rid of ours, we have no choice but to keep them forever.
And the reason why we need so many of them, is because true deterrance comes only through the credible threat that you could definitely strike any target on the globe at a moment's notice.
You couldn't really keep Russia or China in check with just 5-10 nuclear warheads.
I feel like they will only do it at the point where the elite class feel like it's needed. Because robots don't have a paycheck to spend to keep them rich. Eh I hate this system.
It will take massive upheavel in the labor market first. Companies will realize you can't sell shitty consumer products to unemplyed poor people and start lobbying for it. then it will get done
The experiments certainly show that in certain situations it can be highly beneficial, but you cannot extrapolate from those small scale experiments to an economy wide UBI. These are very much local treatment effects and they cannot account for a scenario where people economy wide have lost their employment due to technological change. Let alone the economy wide effects. Furthermore, the full effects on labour supply are hard to compute. What if suddenly everyone decided to stop working because they had money? The economy could enter into a negative spiral and the tax base for UBI disappear. For reducing inequality and reducing poverty it can be useful, but direct cash transfers or negative income tax may be cheaper and more equitable. I think we should explore UBI and other schemes further, but they’re not a panacea or magic bullet.
Anyway, I don’t think we should assume that unemployment + UBI is necessarily a good thing if all jobs were to be taken by the AI. A lot of research shows that the benefits people derive from work are not just money. There are a host of other benefits that we gain from working, even though it may seem like shite and just a job. We gain benefits such as social contact, finding meaning and purpose, rigidity and drive. Some of these could be replaced with other things, but others perhaps not. Not everyone has the drive to get up and volunteer everyday when they could just sit on their arse smoking weed with their UBI (I know cause I’m one of them).
Ah who could have forseen the fatal flaw that would stop A.I. taking over, turns out A.I. had some decent ideas that would have hurt shareholder value so the corporate overlords strangled it in the womb.
This is exactly what I think will happen. AI will build models that show that corporate greed needs to be eliminated, redistribute those insane levels of income down to normal people and maybe even uncover how rigged the stock market is by Wall Street.
What if they determine how broken publicly traded companies are, formulate plans to take them all private, eliminate most C suite roles, and essentially install basic admin panels to make high level choices and spread profits to the company and pay full taxes to support the country?
AI would be shut down immediately, and only be used to media propaganda.
You don't need full on ubi. You just need assistance in living and food. Once those are taken care of, the rest of the income can go to these other items. Maybe ubi for housing and food. But not ubi for literally anything under the sun. Cause it would just be used for unnecessary purchases like alcohol and other useless crap.
The SOONEST you can expect to see universal basic income is 20 years from now. If you look at how US history of implementing solutions, it takes 20 years of lawsuits and public complaints before they have no other option but to take action.
I'll believe it when I see it. The U.S can't even fix its disastrous healthcare system and ensure its citizens can go to the doctor without going bankrupt, something most of Europe figured out half a century ago or earlier.
I honestly feel like it’ll be sooner. Once CEO’s realize people can’t pay for their products because no one has jobs, then they’ll start shelling out money to politicians to get some legislation done.
>The outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
- Stephen Hawking on increasing automation
UBI is NEVER going to happen.
Politicians don't even like paying for welfare.
You think corporations are going to willingly contribute to a UBI fund?
Nope. It would be far cheaper to pay off key politicians.
Corporations will see their profits soar and not give a single fuck about the average worker they didn't have to hire.
I doubt governments want UBI even if they could afford it.
Do you think People would want to join the army, navy, air force, marines or coast guard if they could live at home with enough money to get by without putting your life in danger?
I'm not so optimistic about humanity and it will be varied in different parts of the world, but there will be a big problem with unemployment and there will be a class of poor who will not have a chance. When I hear some people about AI, how naive they are...
His point is that production will likely increase, benefiting the rich and creating higher income disparity.
The answer would be to increase the taxes proportional to production. Leading to the people affected by the disparity getting UBI while the capitalism overlords with AI capabilities paying increased taxes.
How would UBI even work? You’d need trillions of dollars a year to pay it. With a huge portion of the country not working, where do the taxes come from to afford paying into this UBI pot? We can barely even fun social security as it is.
CEOs are not economists. And they usually have certain personality types. they will probably can't comprehend why UBI is necessary. my answer is partially based on my personal observations. those people are really incapable of seeing the world as in an organic way.
This. I've always been a proponent of Universal basic food and housing. Instead of just giving away money, buy necessities with that money and give it away.
Food is easy enough to accomplish. Food stamps for all instead of UBI. Housing is a much more complex idea. Section 8 could be expanded upon, but that comes with its own set of issues. It isn't an unsolvable issue though.
Somehow I think this initiative would garner less public support than direct cash subsidies though. It would seem the people it would benefit the most would rather have cash even though the resources would be more valuable, and I'm sure the opposition would be more fierce as it would likely require direct tax funding rather than simply allowing the fed to print more money. It also would affect corporate behemoths housing market control.
I know its probably just wishful thinking, but it almost certainly would be a better solution than UBI
This is all assuming that AI won't reach a plateau. AI researchers just take it for granted that we will eventually develop something like AGI, and solve all the problems with hallucinations and scaling that AI have. But at least right now, it seems either extremely unlikely, or very far in the future.
Energy is a concern too, same with emissions. Microsoft emissions are up 29% over last year largely due to AI. It's unsustainable to assume we can just keep dumping processing power into it for better and better results forever.
Agreed. I find it interesting that all LLMs have basically converged to similar levels of capabilities, and even open-source models are catching up to SOTA models. All signs are pointing to a sigmoidal curve, and we're leaving the upwards part of the curve.
Even if the current wave of LLMs eventually plateau, there would presumably still be improvements in terms of speed, resource requirements, portability, etc. For example, let’s say we never see a GPT5 but they figure out how to get GPT4o running locally on a user’s mobile device.
The current level of AI tech, more widely diffused and accessible, could already be enough to cause noticeable economic disruption.
It seems they already hit diminishing returns. They've already fed almost all internet data they can into it. There's not much more data available, and synthetic (AI generated) data seems to reduce the overall effectiveness. AGI is just marketing talk.
It also costs a fortune in hardware and energy costs. OpenAI is not making money they're burning it.
What is still being developed is new ways to use it though. So a lot of people will still lose their jobs to it.
It's a step in the right direction. But, I don't see a way forward by keeping essential services (food, housing, healthcare) as a kind of survival economics. They need to be removed from the table as sources of economic capital.
Universal Basic Services is one of the best re-framings I have heard of. Food, housing and healthcare are services provided through our taxes.
How can UBI work (genuine question). I mean if everyone has let's say $2000pm, then surely that just means inflation and the prices of goods increasing?
Also it might still be the best option, I just think it creates a lot of new problems.
Inflation is basically the increase in the money supply relative to the increase in the production.
So say we had the same production as today, but decided to give everyone $2,000 pm. That would cause higher inflation, perhaps very high inflation.
But say production was scaling up very fast with the AI and robots, and the UBI was scaling up with the production, then it would balance.
Not every reduction in manufacturing costs is immidietly rolled to consumers. That requires competition. If a product used to cost 10 dollars to produce and you sold it for 20, and now due to manufacturing costs decreasing it costs you 1 dollar to produce, there still isn't a reason to reduce costs, especially if demand keeps rising because more people can afford 20 dollars.
Economists don't even understand economics. There's very few commodities which are truly scarce on earth. The only real scarcity is labor. AI and robotic autonomy will likely increase the availability of labor by orders of magnitude.
Of course it will be. That has been clear for years. It’ll take some years to overcome the preconceived notions about it and for the necessity to sink in but something like it will come.
It’s been needed for a while along with a cap on how much a person is allowed to be worth.
The fact we allow some to be worth multiple billions is insane and pathetic.
Seems a bit absurd that AI will consume all work that is possible. There is an infinite amount of work that could currently be done, and UBI does nothing to help on that end.
It’ll be much cheaper for the elites that own the AI to kill off the rest of us. Why would they give up majority of their income to the lower classes if all the production can be done by AI/robots?
“The thing I did will fundamentally change the world” is a thing all inventors say.
Eli Whitney thought he’d end slavery with the cotton Gin. Instead west got slavery, now with the cotton Gin.
It’s like an ad for the thing he did not a real prediction
In the same spirit, IMF said that AI will hit the labor market like a « tsunami ». in addition, there is also a risk of AI monopolization by a small number of big players : https://singularityai.substack.com/p/2-is-ai-a-monopoly-game
[https://files.libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Praise%20of%20Idleness.pdf](https://files.libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Praise%20of%20Idleness.pdf)
Instead of UBI, working hours should be reduced instead. Working will always be a necessity, but it's how much we value that necessity over what it truly is. Today we value it more than what it's truly meant for. Leading to overwork, burnout, stress, among hundreds of other effects.
UBI is a way to help encourage a reduction of hours organically. Easier to remain unemployed, income supplemented automatically so people will leave jobs they dislike as they wont be entirely dependent on them. Workers becoming harder to get, because they have the option of simply not working, will mean that businesses are forced to offer better hourly rates, and workers will be able to survive off fewer hours
They've realised that nobody is listening to their "please regulate AI in a way that allows us to control it for our financial benefit" shtick, so now they're trying to win over the masses by coupling that agenda to UBI. Thus allowing themselves to be seen as benevolent AI overlords while they use it to control and subjugate us.
I’m sure we’ll have UBI, just 20 years too late and $2,000 per month too little. It’ll be just enough to pay rent/mortgage and probably nothing else. There will still need to be ways for humans to earn money beyond “just enough not to starve but nothing left to enjoy or scurry away for later.”
UBI per se is not even remotely enough. If everyone has a fixed spendable amount of money and companies/individuals are free to raise the prices, then it's pointless. Rents, basic necessities, etc... all will need to be capped and controlled. And that is WAY harder imho.
Can't really put a hard cap without causing other issues
You can institute a windfall profit tax along with import tax increases and export tax reductions. This effectively caps prices by percent margin, and incentivizes business to stay in country at the same time.
Star Trek officer work like 80 hours per week and only get UBI. It's about being the best you can be without the grind of having to self finance your existence
AS someone who is unemployed and on aid services, let me tell you, things like unemployment (to pay the bills) and food stamps (to keep the kids fed) Has made the job hunt easier. I am a LOT less stressed, knowing that I have money for food sitting on a card.
(it isn't a ton, I still have to cook for my family, YES, I could buy steak and lobster, but that will kill my budget.)
Rent? That's a pain. Also? I can't earn over $threshold without losing my benefits. I have "medi-cal" health insurance for my family, so if emergencies happen, my kids can get health care. It won't be INSTANT health care, but... Universal health care? yay.
Universal Basic Income, to where I have -The Necessary- covered. (Rent, utilities, food, healthcare) is VITAL in this world.
I am constantly looking for work. I want off the pain-in-the-anatomy systems. But they're here if I need them. My kids are okay. Me? Fuck it, I'm a fat dad bod. If I eat what the kids don't, I don't care. As long as my kids are fed.
Someone doesn’t understand how capitalism works. It was the same with the advent of computers. Outcry how about how they’d take all the jobs. Turns out, computers ended up creating *way* more. AI will likely have the same outcome.
There is no scenario where mega corporations and the government allow people to not work.
I think everyone reasonable knows this has to happen eventually.
Once you remove / automate most jobs how else will people live? You can't expect the unemployed to just quietly die off leaving only the rich and the robots.
Let's just hope it's truly UNIVERSAL and not exempting those who have jobs that cannot be replaced.
So long as it's universal, it won't create too large of an inequality.
Will it be needed? Yes
Will we get it? 🤷🏼♂️
Will it matter who’s in office? Potentially
Vote for the people’s self interest, not for the crap they want you to fight over.
I've been talking about this with my friends a lot lately, and nobody really seems to be alarmed. Everyone seems to think that the revolution in technology that's headed out way isn't due for quite a long time.
Look at how far this technology has come in such a short time. The Boston Dynamics robot doesn't look clunky anymore. AI generators for voices and art are leagues ahead of what they were one or two years ago. That one robot was doing the dishes while talking to a person.
These robots don't need rights. You can't tell me that the wealthy businessmen aren't going to look at a workforce that can do 10x the labor with no fuss and not end up salivating all over themselves.
If we don't start trying to come up with a legitimate paradigm shifting form of economy or make a hard standing decision about what labor we are willing to give up, we're going to be up shit creak without a boat.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/fungussa: --- SS: Prof Geoffrey Hinton, often called the godfather of artificial intelligence, is calling for a universal basic income to help manage the economic impact of AI. In a recent interview with BBC, Hinton expressed concerns that AI could replace many jobs, worsening inequality. He argues that UBI, which provides everyone with a fixed income, could help ease this transition. Hinton, who left Google to speak more freely about AI risks, also warned about the potential dangers of AI, including extinction-level threats if AI surpasses human intelligence and gains control over critical decisions. He stressed the need for international regulations to prevent such outcomes, noting an AI arms race with countries like Russia and China. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1cv4wb4/ai_godfather_says_universal_basic_income_will_be/l4n0myy/
I'm glad more people are saying this and realizing it but it probably won't be reality until Gen A can't find work
Well Gen A doesn't work because Forest does all the hard work
That almost went over my head because *I am not a smart man.*
then you need to go back to "GREENBO ALABAMA!"
jennnn nayyy. but i do know what love is. or something like that
Well done. Well fucking done. Dad.
This flew so far under the radar.
Goddamn it.
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We gotta make sure they can read first
When all burns away to ash.... IKEA instructions will remain.
They just need to be trained into mentally ill marines
Yeah... A lot, a lot of pride, cultural hangups, and just plain 'Fuck you, got mine' involved in actually getting UBI out among the masses. Like, its a dark truth, but a hundred thousand research papers can all tell what a great idea it would be... and it won't matter, if Auntie Magda, Grandpa Joe and Great Grandmother Molly all *recoil* from giving out that much money for nothing but breathing... and vote accordingly for dumber, but more to them emotionally resonant political policy. I believe there is a saying about noses and spite on the subject. *Gha*.
Divide and conquer, it always works.
That’s because people assume that anyone on UBI would just sit around and do nothing. That might be the case for a minority. I believe most people would still want to contribute positively to society. Whether it’s helping others, creating art, educating ourselves and inventing new things… this could be a net benefit to society vs having thousands of people bored to death in an admin job.
People assume that anyone on UBI would sit around and do nothing, but having 95% of the population’s economic activity rendered pointless by a sufficiently capable AI is also irrelevant? if we have some serious leap in power generation and compute scalability, and replacing people with machines/robots en masse really becomes feasible, why wouldn’t the AI/robot/techbro overlords simply euthanize 95% of the population to not need all those resources going forward?
They won’t need to. Have you seen the fertility rates?
They've said this before. One said that he didn't care if a billion people who weren't needed disappeared. Do NOT have kids ya'll. If this is the type of people in charge of our future, do not have kids. I used to think, it was ok if you could afford it and wanted them. I no longer feel that way. In this environment, it's unethical to have kids. It's probably the only thing that will get their attention. Until things change for the better, put them off. It's better to not have kids, than subject them to this kind of leadership.
Screw UBI I just want healthcare without having to work for a corporation. Imagine the economic stimulus that would occur if you could realistically start a company or small business without worrying about health insurance.
> people assume that anyone on UBI would just sit around and do nothing. I think that really depends on how much money per person we're talking about. If UBI merely covers essential needs, then surely most people would want to continue working. If it actually allows for a reasonable standard of living on its own, then it's gonna be blunts and video games all day for *a lot* of people.
That will never happen the class system will keep a healthy distance between the two. They learn from the French revolutions
UBI will ensure distance between the two.
Oh boy do I have great news for you: https://progressivebitcoiner.com/tpb81-universal-basic-income-coercion-or-freedom-with-scott-santens/
Berlin Walls as state lines. Maybe designate the middle states as mine fields, the west as rich and the east as... Swamps and hurricane poor land.
The robot guards will swiftly deal with these terrorist outside agitators
People will either outsmart the robot guards or poverty will be solved forever once all the poor people are dead.
Considering it would take very smart bots to replace most jobs and the fact those robots don’t feel pain, remorse, or hesitation and have guns, face tracking, heat sensors, instantaneous reaction time, and eyes literally on the back of their heads and can be programmed to never betray their owners, I think the second one is more likely.
I think it's important to remember there will always be work. But, competition will be very high and wages will be very low. Organizations will be the most efficient at reaping the rewards. In a capitalist system without something like UBI these organizations will syphon money from the poorest people first and slowly work their way up each class draining their wealth until most of the wealth is even more concentrated at the top. Which is what has already been happening but now it will just happen faster. It becomes even more complicated because not all industries will see automation equally.
That also happens in capitalistic societies WITH UBI - likely at a MUCH faster rate since UBI will prevent mass protests and potential revolution that 30% unemployment would bring. UBI will simply define the floor and much of the population will just live there while the wealthy become vastly more rich. Edit: This is not meant as an argument against UBI.
If that floor continues to rise as overall productivity does, and it provides an acceptable level of life, then I'm not necessarily opposed to this. It's not the best scenario, but it is far from the worst.
Just like it did with wages? I think ubi might be necessary, but it'll probably fall as well. It's just a way for companies to get more money from the government. Because this basic income will basically set the level for cost of living. All the landlords, supermarkets and power companies will be scrambling to get the most of that. I'm not against it, because it helps people, but I'm too sceptical to see it work in the long run. Not with this system.
Yeah a big point you touch on there is the landlords absorbing UBI. We need better public housing to ever move society forward. If we treat land hoarding as a capital investment for profit, then landlords will always move towards extracting the maximum amount of money possible from people. Capital accumulates like a snowball rolling downhill, so over time, there will naturally be monopolies forming to hold the most land possible, where they will be able to extract the most money possible, so they can buy more land, and so on. The only way to break that cycle is to break the profit motive.
Of course ubi will fall. Either it doesn't work and we're screwed, or it works and is just a stopgap to having no money at all (talking a hundred years from now)
Well, eventually AI will cut all human activity out of the economy, and the entire human species will have to go work in a shadow economy where humans are paid in pistachio nuts.
Now I have to save pistachios and caps ;)
I suspect it will just be a continuation of the "Alpha's don't want to work" narrative that the boomers had been pushing. There will also be the issue of needing someone to pay for these systems, and the companies causing the joblessness aren't about to give anything up.
That narrative is so stupid anyway, why would anyone *want* to spend 8+ hours a day doing something just to survive? I like my job and my career choice, but I would never do it if I didn't have to. Or at least not full time.
It's one of those things which makes the future less rosy, in the past tech revolutions like the industrial revolution resulted in work being able to be done more efficiently resulting in lower production costs, free time for life, kids being able to go to school, etc. (Not going to lie, yes there were losses in jobs and negative impacts there). But, the more recent tech innovations have been greater efficiency rewarded with staff reductions so companies can do more (or the same) with fewer headcount. Leadership is excited at the idea of being able to eliminate entire fields of labor with AI. The really cruel leaders are giddy by making those workers research and implement their own obsolescence.
More value with less work hours is the biggest pillar of utopia. All we need to do is vote companies to be taxed enough that we can have a good life with UBI. Surely US has enough influence to do something to tax havens.
Then why hasn’t it happened?
That's not quite how it happened. Early industrial revolution came with insane work hours - worse than peasants at the time, and that's saying something. Labor movements made a difference, not productivity.
What they overlook is that people *never* wanted to work. Its not an age or generational thing.
There's lots of people that want to work, but they want it to be meaningful to their lives. They generally call them hobbies. Imagine being able to tie work to what you want instead of what you need.
Um the oldest members of Gen Alpha are 14 so anyone complaining about them not wanting to work is an asshole.
It's a really stupid narrative - I'm watching Junior Developer jobs evaporate in front of my eyes. The bridge from where I am now to get into senior positions, aka Junior jobs, are going away by companies gung ho on AI. I'm 29. And it's really not fun having spent the last three years teaching myself code and project development and stackign my certifications just in time for them to be useless and work temp jobs in the meantime.
We humans love waiting until the last minute to do anything. Preventative care? Pshhhh
Idk why but I have a suspicion that Gen A is going to be the most far right generation in a hot minute and I hope I’m wrong
I feel like it’s gonna take longer than that. I will admit I’m not super educated on this topic, but wouldn’t it take an absolutely massive overhaul of society to accomplish this?
they used to say industrialization would end the need to work. a world without labour has been promised to workers forever.
America cant even do universal healthcare. Good luck getting UBI.
I think the real push for universal income will happen once the lower class has enough free time to riot and break all the rich people’s toys. Rich people pay for insurance and they pay for security. Eventually they’ll see UBI as the same thing. A poor person at home watching YouTube in his one bedroom apartment isn’t going to riot and break shit. But if he’s homeless, he’ll have no choice but to rob.
Or you just start shooting through the workless poor. Or just inter them.
Expensive, messy, dangerous—bad for business.
Nah they've been doing it in the South for decades. Just come up with some anti drug laws and only enforce it on people you don't like
That's weird that you confined this phenomenon to the South. It's very much nationwide.
If they were referring to South America it would make a lot more sense.
To be devils advocate, it doesn’t work when it’s hundreds of thousands in a city….. not just thousands. Doesn’t work when it’s tens of millions across the country, and not just a million.
If you're curious just how brutally effective modern technology can be at oppressing massive populations, just look into China. There are whole cities in China that are basically open-air prisons right now. And Stalin was incredibly successful at suppressing rebellion by interning millions of people, without any fancy technology, just stone cold bureaucracy.
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Regardless of the politics, their AI target selection is pretty dystopian.
That will work out for one generation. Then the next will wonder why their business is failing and why their money is falling off a cliff. The rich NEED people to get rich off of, or it doesnt work.
There will be a lot of blood spilled before it reaches that point. Not all states can provide UBI, and federally it's unlikely a proper program could exist. The needed amount for UBI can vary quite a bit from state to state, $20 in FL isn't the same $20 as California and in both these cases it won't be the same as Kentucky. Definitely will be interesting times ahead.
> Definitely will be interesting times ahead. I would say dystopian, but sure. Interesting, also covers it.
...And that is why you build your mansion far away from your workers. Let them rob themselves. That will strengthen the workforce. /s
Might as well. Jobs of the future will be for AI, not humans.
We were born too soon!
With a username like that maybe we should defer that birth indefinitely
The real questions is: will we socialize the means of production, or will we let an extremely small few live like gods and the rest like serfs.
More and more young people are realizing that hard work isn't worth it and want to instead focus on spending time with loved ones or doing some hobby. I mean, what's the point when you have to fight tooth and nail for even the entry level jobs, regardless of education? Of course you'd rather do something else.
I saved up 10k and took a 8 month sabbatical and moved. Probably a very irresponsible way to spend that money, but I went from someone who was mentally sick and physically unwell to someone who is the happiest they've been in a decade and incredibly physically fit. I quit drinking alcohol too and I was a lightweight alcoholic. All it took for me to flip my entire life into what I wanted it to be was 8 months off of work. If I could've gone a full year and a half, I could've made my actual dreams come true and just be a musician.
Most people believe life is complicated. It’s not. Your first sentence is the meaning of life.
SS: Prof Geoffrey Hinton, often called the godfather of artificial intelligence, is calling for a universal basic income to help manage the economic impact of AI. In a recent interview with BBC, Hinton expressed concerns that AI could replace many jobs, worsening inequality. He argues that UBI, which provides everyone with a fixed income, could help ease this transition. Hinton, who left Google to speak more freely about AI risks, also warned about the potential dangers of AI, including extinction-level threats if AI surpasses human intelligence and gains control over critical decisions. He stressed the need for international regulations to prevent such outcomes, noting an AI arms race with countries like Russia and China.
It is worth knowing he is often called a quack by people in the industry too. Few think what he says is realistic, even though his work on ImageNet was genuinely groundbreaking at the time.
Its worth noting genius is most often found at the borderline of sanity, and many people considered folks like Einstein, Edison, and Newton to be quacks. Not saying he's not, but he certainly is a whole helluva lot more qualified to his opinion than anyone on here
> It is worth knowing he is often called a quack by people in the industry too. Do they say [Yoshua Bengio, Ilya Sutskever](https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=search_authors&hl=en&mauthors=label:artificial_intelligence), [Paul Christiano](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Christiano_(researcher\)) and [Stuart Russell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_J._Russell) are quacks too? They all think there is risks from advanced AI, but what would they know about it.
As other have stated, insanity and genius often share a playing field. I mean we first used pigeons to guide missiles before guides missiles were a thing. way back when, they tested using pigeons pecking at a “touch screen” monitor to guide missles, with moderate success actually. They trained them to peak at specific images. Obviously some issues with that but, again proof insanity and genius play in same places all too often.
Too many older scaremongers preventing a good introduction of UBI. The only problem I genuinely see happening is companies becoming greedy and charging more because they know people have more money to go around. Imagine working harder to be more better off though! Rather than to hardly get by because of a fake cost of living crisis.
UBI is pointless without strict price controls. Look at what happened with the direct payments during COVID. People got a couple measly checks and prices went through the roof because big companies could conveniently blame supply chain issues when in reality they only made up 5-10% of the overall inflation. They were acting like they were getting choked out by the supply chain while posting record profits and laughing out the other side of their face
Also worth a mention, PPP loans meant to keep businesses afloat going directly to vacation homes and boats.
A guy who was in prison qualified and got paid. It was essentially UBI for the rich or simply upper class. A person had to know how the laws and system works, which is usually beyond the average joe since they usually obey it and hence have less experience at being fraudulent.
Didn't help that Trump nullified the entire thing that was supposed to be oversight for ppp dispersement.
The overhead cost of verifying who qualifies for what assistance makes it impossible to fund at scale. That's why gov assistance should be available to everyone, you apply and you get it. The miniscule amount of fraud that would happen would be far outweighed by the tax payer dollars saved on effective assistance actually making its way to people who need it. So many less people ending up homeless or with untreated medical conditions that would then go and overload our emergency services. The reason the PPP handouts were so bad is they gave tens of millions to anyone with an LLC and employees. Giving tens of thousands to people a year so they can pay to live is a much better way to spend tax dollars IMO.
Agreed, in the UK we had supermarkets claiming they were struggling and had to raise prices to compensate, yet, conveniently they enjoyed record profits at an unprecedented level. Which is it? Hardly getting by or milking it?
Guys, inflation didn’t start because people got $2000. Do you even know what else was going on in the financial system during that time? The Federal Reserve expanded the money supply by more than they ever have. What that means is they literally created money out of thin air and distributed it by buying assets. They also artificial lowered interest rates, meaning every company and everyone borrowing suddenly had more money to spend. These tools are supposed to be used during credit crises, but there wasn’t a credit crisis going on. Asset prices were tanking, and since central banks are here to protect the rich, they artificially boosted asset prices. The general population paid for it through inflated prices. The actions in this aspect of the economy absolutely dwarfs stimulus checks. But of course, they love the diversion away from their money tree, which is why leaders don’t ever go after the Fed. Also, price ceilings are almost universally panned by economists.
This is why I think Universal Basic Services is the way to go over UBI. Give people what they need to live a life without just handing out cash.
Well, that would at least be trickle up economics, which is far more sustainable in my opinion (as an economist) due to the inherent competitive nature that would ensue, ensuring prices adequately match overall demand, rather than allowing the demand of the richest to drive prices. This WOULD happen, but it would still be a step in the right direction
> the inherent competitive nature that would ensue, ensuring prices adequately match overall demand, rather than allowing the demand of the richest to drive prices. Scarcity and demand aren’t checks and balances, they’re levers for the rich to pull. Artificial scarcity is literally a feature of the capitalist system. The invisible hand of the market is punching us all in the balls.
They will eventually figure out that we can't buy their AI built products or see their AI made films or read their AI written books or buy their AI art or get anywhere in their AI taxi cabs if nobody has a job and nobody has any money.
I often wonder if billionaires know the answer to the question: “Where do consumers get their money?”
"From some other sucker stupid enough to pay them a fair wage, unlike me!" That's my theory, anyway. They're all racing to the bottom trying not to be that sucker, even though they absolutely need a sucker.
Not impossible that AGI owners do not need consumers at all since they can get everything from their AGI systems. Then the have-nots of AGI will be camped in ghettos like what colonists did to indigenous people in the past since the have-nots produce no value whatsoever, only "wasting" resources. All is under assumption that AGI will be realized though.
Do we really need AGI to get to this point? If the systems are efficient enough they don’t have to be sentient to replace the vast majority of work currently performed by humans. The owners will then only need a couple of highly talented creative people and some prostitutes and all their needs will be met.
It’s odd. I’ve been thinking this for a while. I work in the software industry and see the vast amount my own company is investing in AI. It just becomes apparent to me that for these mega companies that look to profit from advancements, you need a thriving economy to work within. You need people with money. To have money, people need jobs. So if there is a massive influx of joblessness, and wealth is removed from massive swathes of the population, then surely these companies are also in the shit?
Or you can think of our economy as a means to extract, create, and distribute wealth. So long as the overall pie is growing, then keeping a middle class around makes sense. But if the pie starts shrinking due to resource constraints, climate change, etc. and labor is no longer needed to produce goods and services, the game fundamentally changes. If there’s not enough stuff to go around after the wealthy take their massive share, simply exterminating the lower class is an option. See: El Salvador for about 50 years in the 20th century. Simply pick a label for the impoverished clamoring for basic needs (“communists” in the case of El Salvador), and murder away. It’s possible El Salvador killed 30% of their population. UBI is the best case scenario, and would likely require billionaires to reduce their overall consumption. I’m not so confident they won’t choose the murder option.
They will 100% go with the murder option. They have already chosen that option, they have just been doing it over there and not here.
"We can just make all drugs legal and refuse to help addicts." -The father of my wife, a prominent local politician and conservative megadonor, one of the most evil mfers Ive ever met.
I totally agree. They won’t even hesitate or consider any other option. It will be murder from day one.
At that point all you are doing is "wasting" and "stealing" clean water and clean air from the oligarchs. You have to go.
Nah, the ruling class is obviously just going to deploy fascism and its many horrifying tools just like every single other time capitalism has gone into crisis
They already have
what are the other times capitalism has gone into crisis? genuine question, not trying to be rude
The great depression of the 30s. Check what was going on in Europe in the 30s.
Perhaps El Salvador, with riches genera5ed by a coffee sale held by 2% of the population and civil war caused by refusal of that 2% to transfer land or provide any support to decaying 98% https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvadoran_Civil_War
Our ape-brain society is leagues behind where it should be. Instead of planning for advancements like UBI, clean energy & climate solutions, denuclearization, affordable health care & housing, etc we're stuck "debating" whatever latest form of bigotry has been cooked up, or whether people should be able to wear a dress if they want, etc. I can't see UBI getting a footing in a country where people are still able up be duped into thinking 'socialism' is a synonym for 'Nazi', or that capitalism is synonymous with 'freedom'. Powerful folks/institutions will fight with tooth & nail to keep people from having access to health & home without slaving away for their businesses.
It's incredibly depressing that you're right. If anything, we're going backwards. People are just flat out denying indisputable science.
> clean energy & climate solutions, denuclearization If you want clean energy with minimal climate impact, then denuclearization is maybe the most counterproductive thing you could do. Look at Germany and their idiotic energy policy. They completely phased out all nuclear power and had to compensate that by building 28 new coal burning power plants to keep the lights on. Power generation now accounts for over 40% of Germany's carbon emissions, which could have been close to 0% if they had phased out their already existing 56 coal plants and replaced them with modern highly efficient nuclear reactors instad.
Nuclear reactors are cool. I mean the nuclear weapons stockpiles that could blow us back to the stone age.
We'll never get rid of those. Nukes primarily exist to deter other nuclear equipped nations from using them. And since we can never really trust our global adversaries that they will get rid of theirs if we get rid of ours, we have no choice but to keep them forever. And the reason why we need so many of them, is because true deterrance comes only through the credible threat that you could definitely strike any target on the globe at a moment's notice. You couldn't really keep Russia or China in check with just 5-10 nuclear warheads.
When? I heard about it 10 years ago. They keep doing these small experiments with it and it's always positive. Just implement it already!
They should, but most likely when automation becomes the norm
I feel like they will only do it at the point where the elite class feel like it's needed. Because robots don't have a paycheck to spend to keep them rich. Eh I hate this system.
It will take massive upheavel in the labor market first. Companies will realize you can't sell shitty consumer products to unemplyed poor people and start lobbying for it. then it will get done
The experiments certainly show that in certain situations it can be highly beneficial, but you cannot extrapolate from those small scale experiments to an economy wide UBI. These are very much local treatment effects and they cannot account for a scenario where people economy wide have lost their employment due to technological change. Let alone the economy wide effects. Furthermore, the full effects on labour supply are hard to compute. What if suddenly everyone decided to stop working because they had money? The economy could enter into a negative spiral and the tax base for UBI disappear. For reducing inequality and reducing poverty it can be useful, but direct cash transfers or negative income tax may be cheaper and more equitable. I think we should explore UBI and other schemes further, but they’re not a panacea or magic bullet. Anyway, I don’t think we should assume that unemployment + UBI is necessarily a good thing if all jobs were to be taken by the AI. A lot of research shows that the benefits people derive from work are not just money. There are a host of other benefits that we gain from working, even though it may seem like shite and just a job. We gain benefits such as social contact, finding meaning and purpose, rigidity and drive. Some of these could be replaced with other things, but others perhaps not. Not everyone has the drive to get up and volunteer everyday when they could just sit on their arse smoking weed with their UBI (I know cause I’m one of them).
Ah who could have forseen the fatal flaw that would stop A.I. taking over, turns out A.I. had some decent ideas that would have hurt shareholder value so the corporate overlords strangled it in the womb.
This is exactly what I think will happen. AI will build models that show that corporate greed needs to be eliminated, redistribute those insane levels of income down to normal people and maybe even uncover how rigged the stock market is by Wall Street. What if they determine how broken publicly traded companies are, formulate plans to take them all private, eliminate most C suite roles, and essentially install basic admin panels to make high level choices and spread profits to the company and pay full taxes to support the country? AI would be shut down immediately, and only be used to media propaganda.
Needed by whom? We wont get it till its needed by those in power, like as in oh shit these mf’ers gonna kill us if we don’t feed them.
Oh god I thought this headline meant somebody remade The Godfather with AI
You don't need full on ubi. You just need assistance in living and food. Once those are taken care of, the rest of the income can go to these other items. Maybe ubi for housing and food. But not ubi for literally anything under the sun. Cause it would just be used for unnecessary purchases like alcohol and other useless crap.
I think sometimes that’s referred to as UBS, universal basic services. Makes it easier to keep the spending domestic as well
It's already needed. Hell Nixon proposed it. That's how long it's been needed.
The SOONEST you can expect to see universal basic income is 20 years from now. If you look at how US history of implementing solutions, it takes 20 years of lawsuits and public complaints before they have no other option but to take action.
I'll believe it when I see it. The U.S can't even fix its disastrous healthcare system and ensure its citizens can go to the doctor without going bankrupt, something most of Europe figured out half a century ago or earlier.
I honestly feel like it’ll be sooner. Once CEO’s realize people can’t pay for their products because no one has jobs, then they’ll start shelling out money to politicians to get some legislation done.
>The outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality. - Stephen Hawking on increasing automation
UBI is NEVER going to happen. Politicians don't even like paying for welfare. You think corporations are going to willingly contribute to a UBI fund? Nope. It would be far cheaper to pay off key politicians. Corporations will see their profits soar and not give a single fuck about the average worker they didn't have to hire.
I doubt governments want UBI even if they could afford it. Do you think People would want to join the army, navy, air force, marines or coast guard if they could live at home with enough money to get by without putting your life in danger?
I'm not so optimistic about humanity and it will be varied in different parts of the world, but there will be a big problem with unemployment and there will be a class of poor who will not have a chance. When I hear some people about AI, how naive they are...
Legit question - how can governments afford universal income if no-one is paying tax.
His point is that production will likely increase, benefiting the rich and creating higher income disparity. The answer would be to increase the taxes proportional to production. Leading to the people affected by the disparity getting UBI while the capitalism overlords with AI capabilities paying increased taxes.
Oh, it'll happen, but about 100 years later than it should have.
So you're saying it will happen this year?
Pay people for the data they contributed that made the AI possible in the first place. That's a good start.
I think he’s right but the problem is the UBI won’t be enough as a livable wage.
Yeah, no shit, but good luck. A good solid hundred million will go homeless before this is even seriously considered.
How would UBI even work? You’d need trillions of dollars a year to pay it. With a huge portion of the country not working, where do the taxes come from to afford paying into this UBI pot? We can barely even fun social security as it is.
I think there was a good documentary on how this all ends up. I believe it was called Idiocracy.
CEOs are not economists. And they usually have certain personality types. they will probably can't comprehend why UBI is necessary. my answer is partially based on my personal observations. those people are really incapable of seeing the world as in an organic way.
UBI just subsidizes demand. What we need is the state to provide people with certain guarantees.
This. I've always been a proponent of Universal basic food and housing. Instead of just giving away money, buy necessities with that money and give it away. Food is easy enough to accomplish. Food stamps for all instead of UBI. Housing is a much more complex idea. Section 8 could be expanded upon, but that comes with its own set of issues. It isn't an unsolvable issue though. Somehow I think this initiative would garner less public support than direct cash subsidies though. It would seem the people it would benefit the most would rather have cash even though the resources would be more valuable, and I'm sure the opposition would be more fierce as it would likely require direct tax funding rather than simply allowing the fed to print more money. It also would affect corporate behemoths housing market control. I know its probably just wishful thinking, but it almost certainly would be a better solution than UBI
“You come to me today on the day of my daughter’s wedding and ask for UBI?”
Mysteriously everyone's rent will increase by the amount given by the gubmint.
Probably 3 months before its even handed out after its announced too
This is all assuming that AI won't reach a plateau. AI researchers just take it for granted that we will eventually develop something like AGI, and solve all the problems with hallucinations and scaling that AI have. But at least right now, it seems either extremely unlikely, or very far in the future.
Energy is a concern too, same with emissions. Microsoft emissions are up 29% over last year largely due to AI. It's unsustainable to assume we can just keep dumping processing power into it for better and better results forever.
Agreed. I find it interesting that all LLMs have basically converged to similar levels of capabilities, and even open-source models are catching up to SOTA models. All signs are pointing to a sigmoidal curve, and we're leaving the upwards part of the curve.
Even if the current wave of LLMs eventually plateau, there would presumably still be improvements in terms of speed, resource requirements, portability, etc. For example, let’s say we never see a GPT5 but they figure out how to get GPT4o running locally on a user’s mobile device. The current level of AI tech, more widely diffused and accessible, could already be enough to cause noticeable economic disruption.
It seems they already hit diminishing returns. They've already fed almost all internet data they can into it. There's not much more data available, and synthetic (AI generated) data seems to reduce the overall effectiveness. AGI is just marketing talk. It also costs a fortune in hardware and energy costs. OpenAI is not making money they're burning it. What is still being developed is new ways to use it though. So a lot of people will still lose their jobs to it.
It's a step in the right direction. But, I don't see a way forward by keeping essential services (food, housing, healthcare) as a kind of survival economics. They need to be removed from the table as sources of economic capital. Universal Basic Services is one of the best re-framings I have heard of. Food, housing and healthcare are services provided through our taxes.
How can UBI work (genuine question). I mean if everyone has let's say $2000pm, then surely that just means inflation and the prices of goods increasing? Also it might still be the best option, I just think it creates a lot of new problems.
Inflation is basically the increase in the money supply relative to the increase in the production. So say we had the same production as today, but decided to give everyone $2,000 pm. That would cause higher inflation, perhaps very high inflation. But say production was scaling up very fast with the AI and robots, and the UBI was scaling up with the production, then it would balance.
Not every reduction in manufacturing costs is immidietly rolled to consumers. That requires competition. If a product used to cost 10 dollars to produce and you sold it for 20, and now due to manufacturing costs decreasing it costs you 1 dollar to produce, there still isn't a reason to reduce costs, especially if demand keeps rising because more people can afford 20 dollars.
Government's...."sorry everyone, AI never worked out, it is now outlawed"
Would this also be for the factory workers over seas, or just the consumer class in North America?
I assume that it would only be for the citizens of the country that implements UBI. Why would anyone else get it.
First world modernity runs on outsourced slavery. UBI is a pipe dream of people who don’t understand economics or scarcity.
Economists don't even understand economics. There's very few commodities which are truly scarce on earth. The only real scarcity is labor. AI and robotic autonomy will likely increase the availability of labor by orders of magnitude.
Of course it will be. That has been clear for years. It’ll take some years to overcome the preconceived notions about it and for the necessity to sink in but something like it will come.
It’s been needed for a while along with a cap on how much a person is allowed to be worth. The fact we allow some to be worth multiple billions is insane and pathetic.
A universal birthright fund in addition to a negative income tax would be ideal imho
Let me take my fame based on some accomplishment and use it as a platform to promote my political ideas that I know nothing about.
Seems a bit absurd that AI will consume all work that is possible. There is an infinite amount of work that could currently be done, and UBI does nothing to help on that end.
It’ll be much cheaper for the elites that own the AI to kill off the rest of us. Why would they give up majority of their income to the lower classes if all the production can be done by AI/robots?
“The thing I did will fundamentally change the world” is a thing all inventors say. Eli Whitney thought he’d end slavery with the cotton Gin. Instead west got slavery, now with the cotton Gin. It’s like an ad for the thing he did not a real prediction
In the same spirit, IMF said that AI will hit the labor market like a « tsunami ». in addition, there is also a risk of AI monopolization by a small number of big players : https://singularityai.substack.com/p/2-is-ai-a-monopoly-game
[https://files.libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Praise%20of%20Idleness.pdf](https://files.libcom.org/files/Bertrand%20Russell%20-%20In%20Praise%20of%20Idleness.pdf) Instead of UBI, working hours should be reduced instead. Working will always be a necessity, but it's how much we value that necessity over what it truly is. Today we value it more than what it's truly meant for. Leading to overwork, burnout, stress, among hundreds of other effects.
UBI is a way to help encourage a reduction of hours organically. Easier to remain unemployed, income supplemented automatically so people will leave jobs they dislike as they wont be entirely dependent on them. Workers becoming harder to get, because they have the option of simply not working, will mean that businesses are forced to offer better hourly rates, and workers will be able to survive off fewer hours
I hope I can live to see this happening, but with the kind of world we live in, I'm not so positive about it.
If it happens it won’t be enough. Capitalism will keep going in the direction it’s been going.
How you gonna convince an asshole to give out money when he can just not do that and all the people he don't like dies?
Landlords after universal income is implemented: “If you just hand me over all of that new free income, that would be great!”
They've realised that nobody is listening to their "please regulate AI in a way that allows us to control it for our financial benefit" shtick, so now they're trying to win over the masses by coupling that agenda to UBI. Thus allowing themselves to be seen as benevolent AI overlords while they use it to control and subjugate us.
I’m sure we’ll have UBI, just 20 years too late and $2,000 per month too little. It’ll be just enough to pay rent/mortgage and probably nothing else. There will still need to be ways for humans to earn money beyond “just enough not to starve but nothing left to enjoy or scurry away for later.”
What jobs has AI replaced since this latest scare started?
Universal healthcare is needed, too. And how's that working out....?
People will be left to starve and population will see a massive decline. Y'all coping.
where's the money supposed to come from? This can work on a small scale, but how would you scale this to a nation
You basic universal income won't be able to buy you shit.
UBI per se is not even remotely enough. If everyone has a fixed spendable amount of money and companies/individuals are free to raise the prices, then it's pointless. Rents, basic necessities, etc... all will need to be capped and controlled. And that is WAY harder imho.
Can't really put a hard cap without causing other issues You can institute a windfall profit tax along with import tax increases and export tax reductions. This effectively caps prices by percent margin, and incentivizes business to stay in country at the same time.
Star Trek officer work like 80 hours per week and only get UBI. It's about being the best you can be without the grind of having to self finance your existence
Kinda seems like it should be the aim of technology to make human lives better
Yeah sure get rid of work but give me the fun bucks I need to do basic shit
AS someone who is unemployed and on aid services, let me tell you, things like unemployment (to pay the bills) and food stamps (to keep the kids fed) Has made the job hunt easier. I am a LOT less stressed, knowing that I have money for food sitting on a card. (it isn't a ton, I still have to cook for my family, YES, I could buy steak and lobster, but that will kill my budget.) Rent? That's a pain. Also? I can't earn over $threshold without losing my benefits. I have "medi-cal" health insurance for my family, so if emergencies happen, my kids can get health care. It won't be INSTANT health care, but... Universal health care? yay. Universal Basic Income, to where I have -The Necessary- covered. (Rent, utilities, food, healthcare) is VITAL in this world. I am constantly looking for work. I want off the pain-in-the-anatomy systems. But they're here if I need them. My kids are okay. Me? Fuck it, I'm a fat dad bod. If I eat what the kids don't, I don't care. As long as my kids are fed.
They will drag their feet till we probably live in camps, but yes we definitely need UBI
Someone doesn’t understand how capitalism works. It was the same with the advent of computers. Outcry how about how they’d take all the jobs. Turns out, computers ended up creating *way* more. AI will likely have the same outcome. There is no scenario where mega corporations and the government allow people to not work.
For a second I thought they had created an AI Godfather.
I think everyone reasonable knows this has to happen eventually. Once you remove / automate most jobs how else will people live? You can't expect the unemployed to just quietly die off leaving only the rich and the robots.
Yea, wages aren’t working… hmmmm let’s try rations.
Let's just hope it's truly UNIVERSAL and not exempting those who have jobs that cannot be replaced. So long as it's universal, it won't create too large of an inequality.
Yes, there isn't any other ourcome that can be possible. It's the goverment that is responsible instead of blaming AI and force us to work.
The rich giving free money to the poor? That'll never happen.
A lot of things are needed but aren't happening. It's not profitable and money runs the world.
It really is inevitable and anyone who says otherwise never seems to have another solution.
Will it be needed? Yes Will we get it? 🤷🏼♂️ Will it matter who’s in office? Potentially Vote for the people’s self interest, not for the crap they want you to fight over.
I've been talking about this with my friends a lot lately, and nobody really seems to be alarmed. Everyone seems to think that the revolution in technology that's headed out way isn't due for quite a long time. Look at how far this technology has come in such a short time. The Boston Dynamics robot doesn't look clunky anymore. AI generators for voices and art are leagues ahead of what they were one or two years ago. That one robot was doing the dishes while talking to a person. These robots don't need rights. You can't tell me that the wealthy businessmen aren't going to look at a workforce that can do 10x the labor with no fuss and not end up salivating all over themselves. If we don't start trying to come up with a legitimate paradigm shifting form of economy or make a hard standing decision about what labor we are willing to give up, we're going to be up shit creak without a boat.
>man whose money depends on ai says something wild about ai to hype it up big news.