A World Without People

Many arguments regarding the current incarnation of ML and its mainstream uses go like this:

— It will take our jobs.

— That is not a failure of automation, it’s a failure of our socioeconomics.

— That doesn’t make it a non-issue. People need to eat and have a purpose.

— When it gets really bad, governments will use the immense productivity gains we get from this tech to institute UBI, and we will live happily ever after.

It is often difficult to provide a further counterpoint to that (except that it puts a little too much hope that future governments, after concentrating power and wealth, will be so benevolent), but that’s one way to put it:

> Billionaires love UBI for the same reason they love charter schools. In the AI UBI fantasy, everyone who's not a billionaire has been replaced with a chatbot, and our only job is to receive government vouchers that we hand over to billionaire grifters who run the institutions that used to be under democratic control.

It’s a bit harsh, but I suppose sometimes one might have to exaggerate to get the point across.