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Comment by consumer451 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if something like UBI will ever be implemented, or whatever the alternative is will happen.

In a world of UBI, and AI doing most of the work, how free are you? In every definition of the word. When we were all farmers, things were pretty equal, and power could be distributed evenly. In our industrialized world we lost a lot of freedom "effectively". In a world of UBI, and AI, you're completely at the whim of whoever owns the machines. The AI needs to be owned by everyone.

Does freedom matter when there's nothing left to do?

Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.[0]

[0] https://americansongwriter.com/me-and-bobbie-mcgee-by-kris-k...

> When we were all farmers, things were pretty equal, and power could be distributed evenly.

Peasants[0] living under feudalism[1] might argue that the large scale loss of equality already happened in agricultural societies.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasant [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feudalism

Current conservative influence will delay UBI adoption. We'll first have to experience years of massive unemployment with no signs of improvement before we'll see something like UBI be instituted. It's going to make for an interesting period.

What will delay UBI adoption is that governments can't afford the current welfare systems, many of which are unsustainable, let alone a much bigger one. France can't even raise the retirement age by like one year due to massive protests but they have to, as the current retirement age is unaffordable.

No if we have fancy machines that can do all the work we are not very poor, we are very rich.

We should lower the retirement wage, or (better) reduce the work-week, to spread the work around more evenly.

We have more wealth in the world than ever before. The problem is that it's distributed through something like a power law curve where a tiny proportion keeps all the wealth. If we changed that wealth distribution to something closer to linear then we'd have plenty of wealth to fund welfare systems while the rich can continue with their lives of luxury.

UBI is good within a libertarian framework.

Actually, universal, unconditional.

Everything other version is totalitarian dystopia.

That seems like the only reasonable way to do it. Humans are terrible at predicting the future, and preemptively implementing UBI could be disastrous. What if you implement UBI and the AI future never arrives? Or doesn't arrive for 100's of years? You just made a massive mistake because people thought they were smart enough to "know" what AGI was going to look like and how it would impact society.

I think we've had a few small scale experiments with UBI that showed it likely improves the lives for many, while not acting as a disincentive for others. If nothing else, bad employers would have to improve how they treat their employees. That's not a bad thing either.

since UBI does not mean "unlimited consumptions for everyone" but some people will definetly want to consume more than others, and assuming with rampant automation there will just be basically zero jobs available exclusively for humans I generally wonder what humans will do to get more money to consume more? It seems like were just moving to some new kind of feudalism which is kinda scary.

Futurama's suicide booths may turn out to be most cost effective.

$21.06 trillion (US GDP 2020) / 258,000,000 (US pop. over 18yrs old) = $81,628 per person. After taxes and the National AI fee, that leaves $35,324 per person.

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Funny, I had just watched Plan 75 yesterday.

People will fight over resources. Some will lose. As the ancients said, vae victus.

Maybe AI will be the objective UBI governor.

What an efficient and well run dystopia.

It will be UBI to stave off the bread riots and then fiver-type gig economy for every profession out there.

Suffering will be implemented.

the alternative looks like robocop slum skyscrapers to me

UBI won't happen after the shitshow that was 2020. If there wasn't widespread looting and civil unrest, maybe.

That was as close of a test of the idea as the US will ever get. Another country will have to try and have it be VERY successful for a second shot at it here.

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