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Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never had this worry. When I was funemployed last year, I spent my time reading books and writing code and hanging out with friends. If the future is an infinite UBI-funded vacation, I know what I’ll do. “Before the Singularity, read books and throw house parties; after the singularity, etc.”

yeah it's obvious the author has a really high IQ who can keep himself busy with intellectual pursuits and a nice social life of other smart people . His experience will not map to the general population, who find themselves with idle time. Also, a barebones UBI will be hardly sufficient to cover other expenses unless the AI also solves housing, healthcare, insurance, childcare, transportation etc.

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Kohei Saito writes about this at length in Capital in the Anthropocene. Most obvious solution is to build an economy around social labor that has traditionally been externalized to households by capital. Start collectively paying people to take care of each other, children, the commons, public infrastructure and so on.

As ecological concerns and automation eliminate a large chunk of production it's pointless to maintain a system that only knows how to finance exactly that stuff, so socialize the gains of those and start redirecting them to socially necessary labor. There's much more to do than just playing boardgames.

Any steady-state economy without an overlord of some kind keeping a balance (a Potemkin steady-state economy) will have some subset of actors who randomly stumble into scenarios of creative destruction and gain disproportionate rewards from it. Unless the gains are zeroed out repeatedly, this will snowball right back into the kind of mixed economy we have. A good book on the landscape the economy arises organically out of is Beinhocker.

You can have a steady-state economy even under the most classical of economics like Solow, simply when capital stock stays constant because investment equals depreciation.

And it's no coincidence that Saito is Japanese because that's what Japan has been living in. They've not grown in decades. Without overlords, it's an adaption to a world where the average citizen is 50, ecology cannot sustain consumption and significantly more time will be dedicated to mending the environment, taking care of old people, and putting technology to work to make that possible.

For those with low IQ like me, there's video games, movies, piracy, parties, and hiking.

And probably AI will make those even more addictive

I would say most people do in fact need a life of purpose and fulfillment through some aim larger than themselves that has intrinsic value, can reinforce self worth, etc. I think very few people will find purpose and fulfillment through and endless stream of games, movies and parties. The question is what do those people lacking purpose do with their time as they try to find it, or how do they cope with a life of purposelessness?

if somebody feels purposeless, why not do something useful or productive or creative? Such as a "high iq activity" like reading or learning or volunteering or art.

The nature of novel innovation makes it basically unpredictable, I'm less worried about providing a safety net for video game playing pleasure maxxers and far more concerned about that orphan crushing machine we have currently (as an orphan.)

> His experience will not map to the general population

Well, I can't solve everyone's lives.

You don't need high IQ to enjoy reading or hikink, most people could and should decide to like it more.

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