Who are you counting as being in "any position of power"? All the AI lab people are saying that the most likely and best outcome is we all live in a world of abundance where money doesn't matter anymore. Dario, Sam, Demis, and Elon have all said this loudly and repeatedly to anyone who asks.
None of them have articulated a coherent way to get there from here. But they all believe that the technology will make it possible, so the only unresolved question is how to transition us there.
From what I've seen, UBI is just a carrot dangled in front of the poors by utopian Silicon Valley tech bro megabillionaires when they're trying to drum up some PR for whatever big idea they're pimping out at the moment.
Feel free to mute me (with the mute extension mentioned in your profile). I doubt there is any productive conversation to be had between us.
And none of them ever spoke a lie. Especially not if it would further their goals at someone else's expense.
While taking and hoarding as much as possible, as fast as possible. Oh and Elon had a brief episode of trying to fire people from government jobs.
So how do we distribute all of this abundance? Do we all get private jets? Is it more important to solve sustenance before transitioning to private jets for everyone? What about the high level cut between r&d, upkeep and "legacy costs"?
Because here's some cold facts: the total amount of available material is finite as is the total solar energy and even if you cheat the latter with space mirrors, the total amount of heat that can be radiated into space is finite.
I guess the idea is that communism will actually work when central planning is managed by AI instead of people. Which, OK, maybe, but even if it's true, the question of how we get there from here without a violent revolution and/or the disempowerment of the human race seems unanswerable.
Elon talks about how the AI will saturate all human desires for material goods. And when I hear that I always think of Han Solo saying "I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit".
I can imagine that potentially mostly working for some goods like food and clothing and personal electronics, but without at least some pretty strict limits on what you're allowed to consume, a tiny minority could cause insane levels of waste. And as soon as you have limits you're going to get people trying to exploit them. That's just human nature.
Then for some other resources I can't see it working at all, chiefly land. Even if we accepted dramatic modification of the natural landscape, which we probably shouldn't, there will never be enough tropical islands or palatial ski chalets for everyone to own one for themselves.
And once I have that, my frenemy from the next street over will want one too.
if one was a true believer, then they'd probably say, all of this will work itself out on its own and there is no reason to worry about human resource markets collapsing.
if they said that (i doubt that they did), it would be a fundamental misunderstanding of what money is used for.
There are a lot of discussions of socialization of health care and basic income approaches and sovereign wealth based on automation dividends similar to the Alaska trust.
I think the current spate of mean cruelty ala MAGA and a glorification of a mean and cruel past that was never a golden age is a death spasm of a deeply unpopular belief system. As the actual realities of the policies sink in 70% of the populace is revolted, which is a super majority. That’s more than enough to put a pin in the philosophy permanently. It is also greatly accelerating electrification, realization of the value of expertise in technocratic systems in current generations, etc. I think humans are socially adaptable animals at a cultural level, but for the individual the adaptation process can be awful. I hope it’s not, because it doesn’t have to be. We will see.
We have no choice, we must tax the common people.
The Uprising (2026)Matrix was a good point to this. They made the world a utopia and people couldn't handle it. Our monkey brains require pain give us a utopia and we'll just walle ourselves to death.
(The ones I've heard about, I'm fairly sure, didn't find anything of the kind. Which isn't to say that they show we should have UBI; there are big gaps between what has been tested so far and what an actual economy with UBI would look like.)
I think you've taken the "work less" that was found in some studies to suggest they needed "toil". They simply found it somewhere else.