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Comment by 3cats-in-a-coat | Hacker News Reader

Governments already exist. To try and upend them by replacing their system of personhood and currency is in effect the tech-bro version of a mutiny. It may seem ridiculous but that's precisely what crypto is. An attempt to replace central banks and governments. Tech companies have grown very powerful, and they see an opportunity to create a world-wide "private government" and they're going for it. This won't be the last attempt. Governments will eventually wake up. Or if not. That's it for them.

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Neat, so are all world governments going to band together and implement UBI? Do you really think that waiting for all world governments to come together and figure this out is the right move here?

I admire the optimism (I think of myself as a pretty optimistic person too), but you've got to realize that there are reasonable people on this planet who think that waiting for governments to fix this is probably not going to turn out well. Some of those people are actually doing something about it, which is what we see here. Maybe Worldcoin works out, maybe it doesn't, but in my personal opinion, it's definitely an experiment worth running.

There won't be UBI. There's work and death. And if AI truly replaces us, it's the latter. I'm not trying to be cynical I'm simply being blunt about how systems work.

You and your environment have to "click together" so you live. In the wild, this means mostly surviving cold, hot, stay dry, find things to eat, and not be eaten.

In society, however, it means being useful to the system somehow, so you get access to other useful things the system makes, like air conditioners, housing, and food, ways to get around etc. If you're not useful to the system, the system may pretend it cares for you, but it doesn't really care for you. This is not up to the morality of the people in charge. It's up to the system. The system elects the people and tells them what to care about. The system is quite resilient. It can withstand certain amounts of welfare, corruption, crime, and so on. But only certain amounts. If you cross those certain amounts, what happened in 2020 with COVID handouts, and the subsequent doubling of prices of food, and so on, happens infinitely and suddenly money is worthless paper. Like Zimbabwe. So if you have somewhere else to run where they're not as stupid as Zimbabwe, you can be useful in that new place and live. If you have nowhere to run, as with a global UBI, you die.

Of course, people won't just lay down and die, they'll just have a revolution like the Bolsheviks did, and speak about how everything will belong to everyone, and of course resources will concentrate to those on top again, instead. With AI however, the overall trend would be you don't need the masses as much, so you don't need to placate most of them. They stop being useful. So revolution after revolution, new people will sit on top and promise it'll be different this time, in a smaller and smaller population.

> With [_____] however, the overall trend would be you don't need the masses as much, so you don't need to placate most of them. They stop being useful.

{mechanical looms,mechanized farming,factory mass production,computerized tabulation,AI}

This has been the progression of economies since steam power after ~1720.

Automation replaces a category of work, everyone decrees the loss of jobs, workers reallocate into new jobs, everyone is the richer for the increased output, repeat.

The only version of this that is substantially different would be 'AI eliminates all jobs below an education threshold, while not creating sufficient surpluses via efficiency gains that they can be supported by welfare'.

Ultimately, I predict UBI is going to look a lot like more general food stamps: standardized basic goods are free, and sufficient for {food, shelter, entertainment}.

We have the industrial capability now, if we so chose.

Survivorship bias is an interesting thing "I keep living another day, therefore I'll always live another day, I'm immortal." The grave is full of these immortal people.

And we're not richer today. It used to be one person (usually the man) provided for the family and the other (typically the woman) took care of the home and children. One job per family was enough. You may consider it outdated, but think of why it is. It's suddenly not fashionable to take care of your home and children. It fashionable to have two jobs, and for your spouse to also need two jobs. And you're miserable.

No one "chose" this. If they were offered a choice, no one would pick it. The system picked it for us. And we're too myopic to understand what we're walking into. The current employment figures are a sham. The homeless and the unemployed are on the streets, crime is rampant, and this is still paradise compared to what it'll be in 5 years.

So the last refuge is our intelligence, like during the industrial revolution and computing yes? The good old times. "Machines will do the work, so we have more time to think." But this time, AI is coming for our intelligence. Thinking machines. Education won't save you because your education is outdated before they even give you the diploma. And AI doesn't really need you that much lately. You're just clicking a button. And then your boss notices that. And lays you off. Welcome to the singularity.

Look at the track record of the people involved, at the track record of crypto, do you think they are really going to give anyone money because of ethics?

LOL. "Sam Altman" is not trying to upend governments. It's the opposite. Him and his ilk are trying to interface with governments in such a way that they can use the legal violence of a government to streamline the integration of their systems (schemes) into the public's life. Sam Altman wants to use the same play book that pharmaceutical and defense industry's use (regulatory crony capitalist capture). This is not "tech bro" mutiny this is -- probably -- the first of many crony capitlist (BlackRock\Ratheon\Etc\Etc) attempts at duplicitous digital currency.

Governments exist, and the current standard of identity verification is a laminated piece of paper with a picture on it. If you're giving away free money you might want to have a standard slightly higher than that.

The laminated "paper" has microchip in it in most places and codes which can be checked against a central database. It's a good enough standard. In fact better than crypto-chaos.

Sure, but maybe that payment power is going to have a lot of side effects that are worse than limiting/filtering gifts through potentially corrupt governments that can also prevent other situations.

For example, the resource curse implies there will be great reasons for companies to risk gifts of small amounts of money to lots of people in a country about to vote on whether to protect collective assets from corporate theft..

All the weird action committees of US corruption haven't even had the logistics to directly bribe voters of a low population state to piss in the pot. Should they get iris wallet addresses for everyone correlated to scan locations? Is anything the US would do about this beyond the capabilities of Kenya?

Um, "personhood" and currency aren't anything like the main functions of a government. If you had everything Worldcoin wants to do, it still wouldn't replace any governments.

Try and think what else the government has. Police, military? All those are second order effects. Think how the government controls those institutions. Money & the ability to spend it as a person or an organization. If you control people's legal existence in your own monetary system without alternatives, means all the government has will become yours.

This is how the USD works by the way (in systems like the petro-dollar), and why so many are trying to replace it. It's not easy. But they'll keep trying. And when they succeed, the American hegemony is over.

In Mexico there's technically a government. But really there are the vast networks of drug cartels. They have their own military, they control politicians, they choose who is and who isn't. It all started by them making a ton of money. The rest followed. If you control the money and who can spend it, you control the economy. If you control the economy, you control everything.

Money is also a second order effect.

It stems from human tax base (after we mostly eliminated direct government capital ownership when we did away with monarchies).

And human tax base ultimately stems from... the ability to count. Which is the identity question.

People. Assets. Productivity. Profit.

A government which lacks the ability to count cannot have a stable tax base, which increases stability risk and therefore decreases the value of their money.

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