Elon Musk: Basic universal income is the solution to robots taking our jobs | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk: Basic universal income is the solution to robots taking our jobs

thinkerspost.com

45 pointscsdfg785616 comments

I can totally see the appeal of basic income. I can even imagine a culture/economy where it works.

What I don't understand at all right now is, how do we transition where we are now in such a direction?

A change of this significance will not be implemented overnight. How do you start preparing the people and the economy of a nation to accept the idea that working is an option rather than a need?

Making work optional for a subset of people will result in political divisions.

Pushing the politics before the technology is established could damage the output of the nation as well as add friction to the initiative.

Waiting until large parts of the population are economically redundant seems worse.

The right way is to first focus on policies that reduce cost of living. Encourage affordable housing, lower healthcare costs, and build infrastructure to support autonomous vehicles. The first two of these step on too many toes though, and would be opposed, and the third requires a lot of money and time.

The problem with housing is that it's been sold to people as an investment, and people don't want the price of their house to go down, which is exactly what would happen if you increased the supply of homes. So towns pass zoning laws to prohibit low cost housing in order to keep prices high. Governments need to step in to limit this type of regulation, so that more housing can be built.

For healthcare, two things can help dramatically decrease the cost. One is end of life planning. Encouraging people to talk to their families and fill out the forms has save huge amounts of money in places that have managed to create a culture of planning. The second factor that could greatly reduce costs is automation. Updating regulations to permit for more autonomous diagnostics and allowing PAs and nurse practitioners to take on more duties from doctors with the aid of technology could significantly improve efficiency.

Finally, highway lanes should be allocated for self-driving car fast lanes, where autonomous vehicles can travel at speeds of more than 100mph. This would allow for convenient fast transit from cheaper suburban an rural areas, and would reduce cost of living significantly.

>Fortunately, working for money is not an inherent part of nature. It is a construct, created by people, that can be changed by people

I don't think that's true. Certainly money is not a part of nature, but I think working in exchange for goods and services is an inherent part of human nature as demonstrated by archaeological records of early humans.

For example starting about 130 000 years ago, (and even earlier according to some researchers) we have evidence of long distance trade roots being established between prehistoric human tribes.

All of recorded history begins at a period when long distance trade roots had already been established.

Trade seems to me to be a fundamental aspect of what makes us human. Without the opportunity to create value and exchange things of value I fear much of humanity may end up in the dire state that many long term welfare recipients or third world welfare states experience.

We seem to have had a similar society organizations in the past. Slavery developed in many places on Earth across many regions, and sometimes sustained for at least centuries.

Different members of societies could have different number of slaves, and the associated abilities to generate consumable resources, but you can imagine a whole society based on slavery (assuming slaves are not a part of society).

Replacing slaves in such an organization with robots was considered in some fictional stories (Asimov, IIRC). This may help to start shaping some approach to the question.

Robots are tools. Tools can only ever act as a multiplier for the productivity of a worker. A robot can't take your job anymore than a power screwdriver can take a carpenter's job, it only makes the carpenter more productive. This only eliminates jobs if you arbitrarily hold the total amount of production constant. Why would you do that?

In a sane society, we'd celebrate increased worker productivity and use it to increase quality of life by making more and better things and maintaining the things we already have. Entropy ensures there will always be useful maintenance work to be done.

It really shows how effective media gas-lighting has been that otherwise smart people believe that increased productivity necessitates unemployment or a massive shift of economic control to the public sector.

All of that said, there are definitely reasons to move money creation away from the top 0.1% that are well connected and have banking licenses and somehow tie it more directly to productive behavior by individuals. Basic income is only interesting as a baseline model. The same total amount of new money could be introduced to the economy by lottery for example. Anytime you game something like this out you should include a random model as well as a constant one, as baselines to compare more sophisticated approaches against.

Making more things isn't necessarily a good thing if the demand for the things you make doesn't match the supply.

It's not "the solution." It's a stopgap measure. I don't want to turn my HN account into a broken record, but I can't believe so many people who would never need a basic income think it's such a great idea for everyone else. Giving people money that they can only spend at companies the rich control is not freedom, it's ensuring survival at the cost of control over your own life. It's a recipe for complete disaster.

How have the current experiments with BI been going? I agree we need to work in this direction, but lets not jump in both feet first. Lets build a solid evidence-based system to land on

Hopefully this means that we can move to a position where people have the means to explore and research, but don't have to worry about not being able to meet their basic needs. Perhaps it also means that it empowers people to leave jobs that they don't want to do in pursuit of something they find to be more nobel.

I think we do need an entirely new paradigm for society and work given automation.

However, can UBI be economic? If we pay all 300 million in the USA 15k a year, that's 4.5 trillion a year. The annual GDP is about 17 trillion, so that's about 20 percent of the economy, or the entirety of the Federal budget right off the bat.

The current ideas I heard are based on the assumption that most work has been replaced by machines/robots/far less people; that means that the money those robots make now replaces the actual humans that made it before. The largest issue is that the owners of those robots (big companies) use tax havens and/or keep most money in the hand of a few of their wealthy owners.

See the 50 year old Hugo winning novella by Philip Jose Farmer: Riders of the Purple Wage.

This is important. Prior to this point most of the chatter about basic income was in-group people talking to other in-group people. Elon is an in-group person who for a variety of reasons has a lot of out-group people listening to him. That matters.

At any rate, I'm glad to see BI becoming and increasingly mainstream idea.

Why do so many out-group people think an in-group person has their best interests in mind? By definition they are from two opposing groups.

UBI is the feel good solution to the problem of overpopulation but the much more likely solution is a simple cull.

Great idea! We'll start with you.

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