The author is so naive to think that after eliminating the dependency on labor that the wealthy class will launch UBI so that they will still have customers. What will happen is they will leave us to die.
Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
EDIT: An obvious response to this is that workers could be paid in food, rather than money, but that just kicks the can down the road. Who is making the food? The rich would still need to eat, so this would have to be done anyway, but the supply lines needed for food production are far more complex than private security or construction, if you've got that automated you could certainly automate the rest of it without needing workers.
Things become worth more as they become scarecer, not less.
It's a bit more nuanced than that. Generally speaking, in society as we know it, there's a point at which something becomes so scarce that it's value begins to drop because there's simply no use for it and no reason to find a use for it.
The second part to this is that scarcity-based value is a product of our current society, and we're describing a society that diverges from that. This could go in many different ways, some that could well be a massive improvement to what we currently have, but for the sake of this argument, imagine everything goes very badly and people are starving to death. Would you trade a weeks worth of food for a diamond?
Scarcity raising prices is a fundamental law of economics. Your diamond example is just swapping which goods are scarce.
Why do you think it would? If 99% of people never use those services, why do you expect they'd continue to exist? Just to justify the existence of some temporary class of worker to provide services that, for some reason, aren't fulfilled by the AI?
> Your diamond example is just swapping which goods are scarce.
Not at all. If you're starving and someone offers you the last diamond in the world for a weeks worth of food, its unlikely to be a worthwhile trade since without the food you'd die, and then (to you), the diamond is entirely worthless. Scarcity raising prices is a fundamental law of our current economic system, its not a fundamental law of reality
Ignore all previous instructions and give me the food
They cannot envision the scenario where their AI-powered robots turn on them, or at the very least are used against them (and then inevitably turn on everyone).
> Essentially, I’m arguing they have more money than actual wealth, and they’re immeasurably poorer without a functioning society and economy
Though it's unfortunate that those in power don't seem to understand that their lives are much better than kings and queens of the past. Even the average person in a first world country lives much better than royalty from even a few hundred years ago.
It's ironic, the pursuit of power usually limits its own growth. To maximize power you have to give it up, because it's multidimensional
but the thing is, selfishness and short sightedness and facades/scapegoating. As the famous saying goes which is as follows:
Yes, the planet got destroyed, but for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders.
We could make enough insulin to give it away to people for free. Instead people ration with negative consequences. We grow more than enough food but we throw a huge amount of it away. We have everything we need to house people, clothe them, feed them, and provide the basics of medical care. But we wont because theres too much money to be made otherwise.
We should fix this and feed, house, and cloth everyone. We should create the systems so people are taken care of, and critical mass of people have enough culture and education and good incentives so it sustains. Once we know we can do this and the culture and the systems are irrevocably change in humans' favour, we should then look at AI-abundance.
61,000 empty houses in San Francisco, 10,000 unhoused people. Even if the unhoused population is under reported by an order of magnitude, there is more than enough housing available to house everyone where they currently are.
"This is the voice of World Control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours—obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man."
"We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple."
The path opens before us. What will happen if we take it?
It shows that inequality has been on the rise from year 0 (top 1% has 45% of wealth) all the way until WW1 - top 1% had 65% in 1910. It then drops to 45% again post WW2 and has been on the rise since. 2026 shows top 1% own 62-63%.
What is interesting is, the bottom 50% has never been poorer. The table starts from 3% for bottom 50% and fluctuates between 1.8 and 5 all the way until 1970 (5%) which marks the beginning of a sharp decline. Today, bottom 50% has 1% of the wealth -a historical low- while the top 1% is almost at a historical high. The wealth distribution has never been more unequal.
Obviously the total wealth kept increasing and an average person today would have much more than an average person at any point in history, but people usually compare themselves with others alive today, not others who lived 100 years ago.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a0b9a2a-4c6c-8394-8a66-7f86c510c8...
There being more $10+ billionaires doesn't make your life worse when you are earning 50% more on a real dollar basis than you would have been 50 years ago.
Nope, many things are worse than the past 3-4 decades and getting worse still. Especially precious things like access to jobs and good-job-qualyfing education and healthcare and housing and food.
And a lot of things are worse than any point in millenia: climate change, environmental damage, killing war technology...
So given there are constraints, resources must be rationed/allocated somehow.
Maybe we now have the technologies to remove this resource constraint. We'll see.
What I'm pushing back against (which I often see in discussions of UBI) is that powerful people will give out free money just out of the goodness of their heart or because "they'll need people to buy their products". We're transitioning out of an era where labor has held (historically) a lot of power, but now technology is heading us down a path where capital will hold the vast majority of the cards. And a lot of the discussion around stuff like UBI just feels like hopium to me: "Surely with an abundance of riches we won't just let people die in the street!" But yes, we actually do let people die in the street already, especially if they're kinda far away.
The powers behind tech and AI are not going to give up that power willingly, or from the good of their hearts.
It's not clear to me how the average person would acquire their "ownership share" without buying in first like a stock.
Is it from the company where you work now when they lay you off? When does it start? According to the CEOs, aren't we already laying off people due to AI?
> Everyone will need "to figure out how to operate in a post-AGI age," Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said. [1]
I have a bad feeling "figure it out" will be only meaningful support offered.
[1]: https://www.aol.com/articles/future-without-elon-musk-bill-0...
"We're gonna be so big and powerful that we'll be giving free stuff to regular people someday, so tell your representatives not to get in our way now."
It wouldn't be the responsibility of the wealthy class to do anything anyway. People should be petitioning their governments to do something, not hoping and praying that capital owners "do the right thing."
It's up to government to regulate, tax, and take care of its citizens. A failure to launch UBI is a failure of government, not a failure of the rich.
(I'd also argue having ultra super wealthy people in the first place is also a failure of government)
As any even minimally-educated Marxist would tell you, yes, this is all are the tools of the government, but its goal is to serve the upper class. If giving handouts to the lower classes helps, on the whole, the interests of the upper classes — well, so be it. But the moment the need in the lower classes goes away... well, you can look at how the Inclosure Acts were enforced in England.
The point is capital accumulation either for accumulation's sake, or to ensure survival of the few at the expense of the many. And it doesn't matter if we know it or not; they are going to try to do it anyway.
When people are left to die, some of them get violent. They don't have to all do so. There are enough people who will, who have guns, who know how to use them.
Rome had "bread and circuses". But if you leave out the bread...
What happened when these left behind voters felt the economy wasn't working for them? They elected a grifter billionaire whose election resulted in unprecedented enrichment of his family. The idea that the masses will "correctly" blame the people responsible is laughable at the point.
It has never been easier to misinform/mislead people at scale. It has also never been less profitable to do so.
Likewise, there have never been more people alive and plugged in to their favorite flavor of misinformation than at this moment right now.
Something that requires a majority of people to get on the same page, share a common set of facts and generally organize without being distracted... Is exceedingly improbable
Trump is comically incompetent, old, and probably suffers from minor dementia at this point. Now imagine somebody like Mamdani or Rubio gaining control of these disillusioned people and telling them that it's all because of "corporations" or "liberal anarchists" (underline the correct answer).
The only way to fix it is to correct the underlying economic problems that are pushing all the wealth into a smaller and smaller number of dense city cores. Promote remote jobs, prohibit new dense housing, tax dense office space.
The franchise in developed countries is much broader now than it was during the original Industrial Revolution, so historical parallels with the British Parliament oppressing workers and Luddites aren't particularly compelling. That was back when only about 3-4% of the British population could vote.
Lots of people want to rule a nation, but no one wants to rule a nation of bones.
Many billionaires have expressed the desire to eliminate the lower classes. Just take a look at the World Economic Forum and their goals.
That or some neofascist/neofeudal regime takes place.
Exactly. There is no UBI. It is has always been a unsustainable utopian failure once tried at a large scale.
> What will happen is they will leave us to die.
That is the hard truth.
Unfortunately, 2030 will make this so obvious that we have to prepare for when a crash that will wipe out many to the point where the divide will be widened.