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Comment by endswapper | Hacker News Reader

The Altman quote is on target "I think it’s good to start studying this early. I’m fairly confident that at some point in the future, as technology continues to eliminate traditional jobs and massive new wealth gets created, we’re going to see some version of this at a national scale."

However, it will likely be called something different in the near-term in order to gather momentum. Often the argument focuses on the concept as opposed to the practical benefits. Putting it in different terms could serve to reframe the argument to focus on the benefits.

These are interesting as well: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/universal-basic-income/ https://salon.thefamily.co/enough-with-this-basic-income-bul...

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People who seriously think a basic income future is desirable should invest the bulk of their research efforts in automation technology. How do you build a fully automated farm? How do you build a fully automated factory and logistics network? How do you build a fully automated hospital? How do you build robots capable of maintaining and fixing all these automated systems?

All these things are way beyond current technology. If they could be built, we'd effectively be in a Star Trek post-scarcity economy, and money would probably no longer be needed. That day is a long way off, though.

Automation is reality.

Industry 4.0's path is being charted as we type, and this is posted today in terms of logistics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12575147

There are things like hospitals that will be tougher to tackle. Money is the currency of power, and I don't see us abandoning power any time soon. So, "Star Trek post-scarcity economy?" I don't think so. However, we will likely experience a temporary(perhaps decades) imbalance between the supply and demand of human labor. In that time, elements of a basic income, or practical equivalents will rise.

I'm not necessarily an advocate of basic income, but an advocate for the basic welfare of everyone.

It isn't all or nothing. For farms, factories and hospitals, full automation would be desirable but we might not achieve that in a very long time. But what if we reach, say, 20% in ten years, 50% in twenty and 80% in thirty. At some point we are going to have to figure out what the increasing number of unemployed people are going to live of. Why not start early?

In the US at least,wealth does not seem to flow downwards. Much labour was outsourced to cheaper countries with less laws and morale constraints. I don't see the guys displaced from US factories enjoying those savings. More likely the profits were taxed at low rate in another country while the real money went to exec compensation.

Agreed. Although I'm not optimistic about Basic-Income itself, I think something similar to that will take over. The longer we wait to experiment and see the pro's and con's of each system, the harder it is going to be to implement a working one once we need it.

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