Elon Musk Thinks Automation Will Lead to a Universal Basic Income | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk Thinks Automation Will Lead to a Universal Basic Income

fortune.com

20 pointsFuNe11 comments

If he's "not sure what else one would do," he needs to think bigger. I'm amazed that America seems so locked in to maximum laissez-faire that the idea that UBI is the actual solution has become remotely popular.

When truck drivers are replaced by self-driving cars, they won't see their monthly allowance as a benefit. People want to have control over their lives far more than they just want to survive. Sure, you have income. You can spend it on more plastic goods sold by the company that took your job, more consumer electronics sold by the company that took your job, more fast food from the company that took your job, all delivered on a fleet of drones from the company that took your job, while trying not to piss off the government infested with lobbyists from the company that took your job, lest they cut off your allowance and leave you for dead. Cycle that money right back to the same rich guys who claim to function on meritocracy and judge every applicant into their world by their ability to speak the arbitrary jargon, bolstered by a nice degree, the right level of expensive casual dress, and your race and gender. Or you could buy a gun.

Giving people comfort without giving them power is a recipe for revolution, and Silicon Valley doesn't get that they'll be the first against the wall; they'll still be wringing their hands and wondering why people voted for Trump when neoliberalism could give them so many cool new phones. Very few people in America are actually starving or on the streets; far more are committing suicide, either directly or through slow drug addiction, not because they don't have the means to survive but because they don't have the means to control their own lives, create their own future for themselves and their families, have the level of basic dignity that a solution like "here's your allowance, now go back to school and study hard" will never provide. Collective ownership, working democracy, a real attempt at a post-scarcity society is "what else one would do."

Welfare is important. UBI could be a fine way of making sure people don't starve to death. That hasn't been the major issue in the developed world for a long time now.

Just because people are not actively starving to death does not mean they are not going hungry, skipping or skimping on meals due to a lack of cash flow; I encourage you to look more deeply into food security (for lack of a better entrypoint, the University of California recently did a study as part of the "Global Food Initiative" and concluded 42% of its students are food insecure). Maybe food isn't an issue in your world, or in my life, but remember: we are the kind of people who sit around and read Hacker News and are the kinds of people whose professions and in some cases hobbies either directly or indirectly have massive effects on other people's lives by undermining the need for not just their job, but all jobs similar in nature to their job; we will have "the last jobs" :/.

As for outright starvation, no there's none of that but in Appalachia and other rural communities where children and adults are underfed. Believe me this is a problem of the first world. And the fact UBI is being entertained means were finally at a point that we can abandon capitalism. It's just a stopgap measure to prevent that eventuality or at least slow it down.

"I don't know what else you could do."

This article regurgitates the same crap I've heard for 45 years, and people have been saying it for longer than that. What else can you do? Same thing that's always been done: automate, take the extra profits for yourself, and the line workers can piss off. I have zero reason to believe it will ever be otherwise.

Or we can take the means of production and hold them in common for the workers? Automation would be the added benefit of not having to slog through 50+ hour work weeks.

Too bad the U. S. has had almost a hundred years to drill into us that anything even slightly along what you mention is to be met with an immediate reaction: "that sounds a lot like COMMUNISM!". At which point common protocol dictates that the discussion is now over.

The reason people respond with "that sounds a lot like COMMUNISM!" when someone says " or we can take the means of production and hold them in common for the workers? " is because that is the very definition of communism!

Absolutely true, but it's weird that socialism had it's chance in states like Minnesota and Kansas. It's sad to see it never went anywhere.

Minnesota has a significant Scandinavian heritage, that's where the socialism mindset comes from. And I think it works pretty well.

Unfortunately I feel like that's probably what will happen as well.

While I think UBI would perhaps be a good solution to unemployment that increased automation is going to cause, I fear we will end up with a situation like in Kurt Vonnegut's Piano Player[0]: those who aren't working will have much lower status and living quality than those working, even if they do have some UBI.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)

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