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Comment by telesilla | Hacker News Reader

"In the distributive era free-market efficiency will no longer be justifiable if it creates whole classes of people who lose."

I lean towards the positive side of Universal Basic Income (my core argument is that no kid grows up thinking they want to be inactive) so it's heartening to see more of these arguments come to the fore.

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UBI is lazy tech guilt thinking. Not to mention it's arrogant. The idea that we've solved all that needs to be done is remarkable. Just look around you. Do you think we are in a place without problems that need resolving? Or work to be done? It's truly a problem of goals of humanity that lead to this disaster of demoralizing pay people to exist UBI thinking. Pay people for education first. We aren't even doing this!! Pay people to resolve climate change. Pay for more research. Pay for xyz that drives humans to new levels while enabling them to valuably contribute to our society. I'm going to write further on this but the UBI mindset is nothing more than lazy arrogant tech people who have no historical frame.

The guilt thing is real. Every thoughtful person in tech knows that what we produce devalues human skill and produces net job loss.

Yes but the lack of jobs is a political problem. It's a problem of vision and goals. Just like a housing crisis. These can be resolved by changing the rules and goals of the group.

People are not things to be engineered. This is our largest collective blindspot. Some people may look at what you see as utopia and say "no, thanks." This can happen for something as simple as UBI. In fact, I'm sure it will.

Progress is defined by enabling people to do more. Do we really want to go back to making energy with coal? It creates lots of jobs. Jobs that can replace with new better ones. I truly believe we are in a crisis of vision. We have food and many material things met but we haven't moved on to pushing for more progress that creates the new jobs politically.

There's danger there. Politics is easily corruptible and divisive when issues of resource allocation are included. Re progress, I don't have an answer. We could argue that despite eliminating all of the jobs, moving to self-driving cars would be good in the same way that reducing coal mining jobs is: both increase safety. But safety isn't everything. It never has been.

Of course there is work to be done. The problem is usually getting someone to pay for it. You need to look at why people don't spend.

One obvious reason is when they don't have the money. Put money in the hands of people who need it and they will spend it, so the work gets done.

You mention various forms of work. Do you know they are more urgent than what people will spend their money on if given the choice? Maybe it's arrogant to assume you know better than them?

>Put money in the hands of people who need it and they will spend it, so the work gets done.

This is one of the most obvious points that too many miss.

I like the leap of logic where insuring everyone has a minimum standard of living means nobody will ever work again.

UBI has a B in it for a reason. You get to Star Trek "no money replicator based economy" way later. But the fact people go hungry and homeless in a nation where companies hoard trillions of dollars in tax havens is abjectly amoral.

> The idea that we've solved all that needs to be done is remarkable.

Yeah, true. The last time society worried that new technology and machines would lead to mass unemployment, the opposite happened. We're in a bigger hurry than ever. Maybe that will accelerate even more.

But, if the human labor need for the trucking industry goes away, for example, it doesn't matter whether we've solved all problems, we will have a very large class of people out of work, even if it's temporary.

> Pay people for education first. We aren't even doing this!! Pay people to resolve climate change. Pay for more research. Pay for xyz that drives humans to new levels while enabling them to valuably contribute to our society.

I agree with this too, but one way to think about UBI is that it could, for the first time, pay people for doing things that are valuable to society, but not profitable. The reason we don't pay much for education or fixing climate change or research is our economy is driven on short term economics. If it doesn't lead to more customers or more dollars in the next year, it doesn't get funding. At it's imagined best, maybe UBI could enable an economy of social good rather than profit.

We have huge problems that could be solved with Ubi. Has nothing to do with working or not working for those already without work, a home, food etc. Besides people are capable of creating a tremendous amount of value in their spare time and often do. Ubi could prove to be a decentralised way of paying people for all the things you mentioned.

The only problem I see - who will pay for it? Considering that in the future most jobs are automated/remote moving a company somewhere else will pose no problem so taxing them will simply fail

The important question! I value (the late, amazing) Alan Watts' take on this: "The answer is the machine. The machine pays for it, because the machine works for the manufacturer and for the community."

or put another way "It will simply come from the share of productivity gains made possible by technology that should already be shared."

https://steemit.com/basicincome/@scottsantens/who-pays-for-u...

https://medium.com/basic-income/machine-labor-day-d77931dca9...

The answer is to (re)-impose capital controls to prevent the capital flight you mention. If we're going to live in a bright future then the days of corporations strip-mining the societies they exist in with impunity have got to come to an end.

Make it so that on your death or when you renounce your nationality, all capital you own goes back to the nation.

The trillions hidden away in tax havens would be a start.

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