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Comment by elictronic | Hacker News Reader

You should learn to vote for UBI?

UBI will turn Earth into the Earth of the Expanse. I truly believe it would be absolutely ruinous on man. Our psychology is just not built for that.

The earth of the expanse is 1000 times better than any time in history.

The life of people on earth doesn't seem better than people now. For connected people it seems great, but for the average joe it seemed awful.

Yes it does. You don't have an accurate understanding of the lives of people on earth now, which is largely constant pain and suffering.

Did you read the expanse? The earth of the expanse is full of crime and destitution. People apply in the tens of thousands for every lottery slot of school or jobs. People just wallow in nothingness. The people fleet earth for mars and the belt just to have a basic sense of purpose.

If we are to just have UBI. Have basic sustenance for no effort, while we have unlimited entertainment and porn at our finger tips. It would be a disaster. I would literally we rather have make work programs.

Yes. I read the expanse.

The problem is you don't understand how terrible life on earth is currently for the majority of people, you are coddled.

That’s unproven, but suppose it’s true: what’s your alternative? If we are in fact facing widespread unemployment, what’s going to be better than UBI at avoiding societal collapse? Billionaires paying private armies to contain poor people is a straight-up sci-fi dystopia but even that depends on enough people having money to buy things from their companies.

If we truly hit the point where we have more people than jobs. That we hit AI improving at miraculous paces that we cant even reskill people. I think it would be better to essentially have make work programs. Have basic qualification programs where you are guaranteed a job. People need a purpose. Throw every person capable of getting an engineering or science degree into labs. Massively expand teaching, nurseing and medicine so there is extremely personal care just by the sheer numbers.

retraining programs are famously both failures and mostly absent for this sort of disruption.

displaced factory workers mostly drift into janitorial or cab driving sorts of work. Why would it be different for other sorts of workers?

This is so fucking dumb. I hate when software engineers try to solve problems. You are good at one thing, do that.

The rest of us will struggle without your help because that's what we been doing. We are literally struggling to fulfill our purposes because we have jobs.

DDT has been banned, cigarettes are all but banned, leaded fuel has been banned. Nuclear energy has been banned in Germany.

The industry wanted all of that and did not get its way after some time. You can ban "AI", make companies respect copyright. You can do all sorts of things.

Since "AI" can only plagiarize, countries that do the above will have an edge (I'm not talking about military applications that can still be allowed or should be regulated like in treaties for nuclear weapons).

TAX. THE. FUCKING. RICH.

Then use it to pay for services like healthcare and education so that everyone has a safety net and opportunity to thrive without just giving everyone enough cash so that they are incentivized to slack.

Maybe. Or maybe it'll turn it into something closer to Earth from Star Trek.

Maybe yours isn't.

I disagree, the only real issue with UBI is the amount of inflation it will cause. Germany has something nearly approaching UBI and they are doing fine.

Would Germany's UBI work if there were no jobs at all?

Nobody knows, because we have never before had no jobs for any reason, let alone specifically due to all labour being fully automated.

Agreed, it's one of the only ways forward I can think of while still maintaining markets in some part of the economy...that is, if you care about the human condition at all. Plenty of these tech leaders seem to want to replace humanity though, so this will be an uphill battle.

It's a nice fantasy but completely contrary to human nature.

What is your alternative, when the price humans can sell their labor at dips below what is necessary for them to survive? All these takes about "UBI will demolish the human spirit" or whatever are just ridiculous when the alternative is "starve to death".

Just doing nothing isn't great for the "human spirit", but UBI doesn't mean people can't find their own goals to pursue. The idea of something where people are not longer required to work to survive is hard to accept since many people haven't seriously considered how they could meaning outside of their careers

I could ask every one of my coworkers what they would do and they would have a realistic answer.

I don't really have sympathy for people attached to their careers. They did that to themselves.

counterpoint : my father had realistic expectations for what he wanted to do post-retirement.

what actually happened was that he sat around purposeless because it turns out that the motivation of producing a paycheck or product was actually the reason he did things. He stopped showering, became depressed, and neglected his health.

And this isn't an uncommon reaction to the open-ended 'free-form' life post-retirement. Some people very realistically need to have some level of structure imposed on their life or otherwise be taught how to create that structure themselves. I think this will be a very real problem whenever UBI gets closer to reality.

I see two alternatives, one that people find new ways to do productive work with or in the presence of LLM, or massive social unrest, rebellion, war and/or starving to death, followed by a reset. I.e. the way human nature has responded to similar imbalances in the past.

So, you have no actual thoughts on this topic other than "UBI is bad" is what I hear.

My thoughts are that UBI is not compatible with human nature. It cannot work at societal scale. I'm not sure how I can state it more simply.

You were asked for alternatives, and said essentially "UBI bad, keep doing what we've been doing". Sorry, that seems lazy and uninteresting to me.

So is a compiler. Humanity is the conscious altering of nature.

Glad to hear you've isolated the UBI-incompatibility (UBII) gene. Could you present your findings for the rest of us?

be real it's just going to be slavery and murder of anyone who disagrees

I can't imagine how it could work internationally, when people can literally migrate between countries and countries ain't sharing resources for free

They can? How many times have you migrated? Try going from the Middle East or Africa to any developed country.

You are joking right? There were handred of thousands of people that did this in last ten years or so to EU.

Funded by an automation tax as proposed by Martin Ford. Not holding my breath on either count. We mustn't upset the 1,000 or so billionaires in this country in any way for they are wise and they are kind and only bad things will happen if we do.

But chin up, peasant, each and every one of us can dream of one day being a billionaire as well if only we act as wise and as kind as they do.

> But chin up, peasant, each and every one of us can dream of one day being a billionaire as well if only we act as wise and as kind as they do.

(I know this was written satirically) but this is a nice example of doublespeak and I immediately got reminded of it.

I wouldn't say that we have reached 1984 level, there is still some decentralization where you can get hosting and then self host from small vps providers as well etc.

Not that most people do such things tho. Internet is still heavily centralized but overall, there are still outlets of escape legally and you are able to sometimes even talk to vps provider owners themselves directly in some cases if they are small enough.

But still, each year although we get away from 1984 the year, we get near to 1984 the book.

As much as I am pro AI and I really am very pro AI, there is definitely an emperor's new AGI vibe amongst the tech bro and billionaire classes. I can only attribute it to a compulsive need to oversell everything and then deliver 25 to 50%, a state everyone is so used to now that if you try to be honest and make claims that state what you can really deliver, they will assume you can only deliver 25 to 50% of what you are claiming and therefore the guy promising twice as much gets the funding.

This makes me happy that I'm nearing retirement but that switch flipping is being delayed by my hourly rate going up for possessing forgotten knowledge. Sigh...

Everyone suggests UBI like this sort of thing is a massive hurricane and we just gotta take it on the chin.

Nah man, this stuff isn't happening anywhere else. We can simply say "No, you don't get to ruin the economy for your personal profit."

Well, here you said it; is it over now?

I'm confused, do you not know what "we" means?

Yes, I have no idea who's this magical "we" in your "We can simply". To me this seems like a textbook coordination problem leading to a tragedy of the commons- even if you got 99.9% of the world into your "we", the remaining "defectors" would have a massive benefit from using AI to replace human labor.

Indeed we need to revolt against AI and force every other big powerful nation to do the same thing. Yet unfortunately that seems like a big joke until AI has destroyed their society too.

Not only can we not just do that (you did not even define what you mean), but China is coming out with models that are good enough for this purpose - and they are, because they are open, everywhere.

The reality of UBI in the United States is that it's going to go from being something freely given to being something that is a full time job to maintain, and then it will be cut or replaced with services that are specifically designed to be as cheap as possible. Until we're all living in terrafoam, birth-controlled and warehoused until we die.

Manna keeps coming to mind for me as well.

It feels like UBI is (at best) likely to become as complicated and corrupt as our tax system already is.

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