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Comment by phatskat | Hacker News Reader

> I also frankly worry about how my kids are going to make money.

Then seriously start thinking about which politicians are going to support a future where fewer and fewer jobs are being done by humans. UBI, healthcare for everyone, access to housing etc are all things that can and should be done already. The more that work is automated away, the more crucial these become.

We should be striving for a “Jetsons future” where complaining about a long work day means being in the office for two hours.

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It also makes me wonder about agriculture.

It's difficult to envision a post-scarcity future where food production is still manual-intensive. Mandatory picking service, as a civic obligation? And there are a lot of food types that require manual picking.

UBI would therefore effectively end production of those types of food. (E.g. more grain, less fruit)

Also, the inter-national implications of some UBI countries while others aren't...

Food production being manually intensive today isn't going to be the case forever. There are lots of innovations happening in ag-tech that continue to reduce the need for humans in the loop * laser precise weeding * drone flyovers + image detection for keeping tabs on the land without going out there * purpose built harvesters that could eventually be driven by an autonomous agent

Manual picking is not so bad if you're only trying to meet your own needs, rather than trying to make a living at it; my family used to visit "u-pick" farms when I was a kid, and we could easily collect all the fruit we would need for a year in a few hours of work. My mother spent far more time canning and preserving it all than we ever did picking it.

Perhaps this idyllic post-scarcity future would include networks of community orchards, akin to the "p-patch" garden system we have in Seattle.

It'll be curious if season-shifting / preserving methods will come back.

Much of international industrial farming seems geared towards "anything, anytime."

Not being able to get fruit in spring, but retaining access during seasonally appropriate periods, wouldn't be the worst outcome.

UBI would likely only be enough for the barest of necessities of survival. Gardening in an empty lot would be an obvious way to supplement that income, with the same benefits of a gym membership.

The point of UBI is that via automation and reduction in cheap energy, opportunities for useful economic activity will be harder to find. In the best case, most people would have a mixture of reliable but marginal income (gardening) and high-potential but risky activity (inventing) with UBI allowing enough security to make crime a bad proposition.

> In the best case…

Why is that the best case? In my “best case”, all of everyone’s needs are met, people pick and grow more intense crops because they want to, artists just enjoy making art, and “income” from work just isn’t really a thing anymore. My best case is everyone has what they need and can access what they want.

It would require a lot of strong social structres. Because a lot of important tasks (like maintaining the floor cleaning equipment in the robot-tractor tyre factory) just really isnt that interesting but still needs to be done. I can see ways motivation can come from others. I'd argue my motivation to persist in my work isn't (directly) because of the money I am paid but rather due to social effects of my colleagues, and the money only contributed to building up this colleague social structure in the first place (alongside the potential value our work brings being an almost equally powerful motivator)

keeping these things going when people lose interest will be a challenge.

> a lot of important tasks (like maintaining the floor cleaning equipment in the robot-tractor tyre factory) just really isnt that interesting but still needs to be done

In a heavily AI-oriented future, why wouldn't that be done by the floor-cleaning robot?

the robot would be the equipment. Someone needs to maintain it, and it wont be very exciting

Why would a human be taking the job of the general-purpose maintenance robot (which maintain each other, before you ask)?

Some people do a job for the pride of it because it must be done. I wouldn't want to be a plumber, but that doesn't mean there aren't plumbers who take pride in doing it. Same with the floor cleaner at the robot-tractor tyre factory.

Though I suspect on a long enough timeline, that job will be automated too and UBI will become a "here's a [weekly|monthly] stipend to live life on, but it's not too much to act truly foolish with."

I would say your best case requires technological advances that won't necessarily happen. In a truly postscarcity future I don't think we'd have any use for UBI. I do think UBI would help empower everyone to work on hard problems in a way that maximizes our odds of getting there, but I'm envisioning it existing alongside scarcity. We're just thinking about very different scales of time.

illegal immigration and migratant issues are already a huge problem. it's less about how good it is in modernized countries, and more about how shit it is in crappy countries. UBI may push that a little more, but it's nothing new.

> UBI, healthcare for everyone, access to housing etc are all things that can and should be done already. The more that work is automated away, the more crucial these become.

This is going to require taxation. Maybe a wealth tax ? Maybe fed-level Georgism ?

I suspect it'll mostly go the other way where UBI really means just shelter and food.

UBI [1] is a pre-industrial era concept. The world inflation-adjusted GDP has grown from basically 500B to 100T [2]; like it's a pretty hard sell that you can't get UBI (as envisioned pre-telephones) to work with a 200x increase.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_basic_income#16th_ce... [2]: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-gdp-over-the-last-t...

Sadly, I think UBI covering shelter and food is optimistic. If the past is any indicator UBI just means a rent increase and we hand over our UBI to the landlords.

Would we still have landlords in a post-scarcity future? Surely if all wealth is being generated by AIs, it's the end of capitalism.

Even if we introduced UBI today, this doesn't make much sense. It wouldn't mean everyone just gets more cash because tax would have to rise to compensate.

I think you're imagining that landlords would think, "oh everyone is getting an extra 100 zorkmids a month, so I can raise rents by 100 zorkmids". But it couldn't work like that because the cash has to come from somewhere; what would actually happen is that someone receiving 100 zorkmids in benefits now gets 100 zorkmids in UBI, and someone who was paying 100 zorkmids in tax now pays 200 zorkmids in tax and gets 100 zorkmids in UBI.

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