[mathattack]

Many great scientists (Einstein amongst them) get into trouble when they veer into Economics. Einstein predicted social unrest from massive unemployment due to productivity improvements. Productivity improvements help people in aggregate.

The question here is will a small subset of the world accrue all the benefit from the AI productivity improvement? One answer is basic income, presumably based on taxation of the rich. Is another answer some kind of universal ownership scheme of the companies creating the AI? I'm not advocating government ownership of business (this rarely ends well) but perhaps some way for the government to give shares in index funds in lieu of basic cash payments? Essentially equity based social security or welfare payments in lieu of some portion of the cash payments. I haven't thought this fully through yet, but it does allow some aspect of shared upside. (My sense is there will be a lot of shared upside anyway, similar to how we all benefit from free maps and search)

[hiddencost]

Russia tried that. When the USSR ended, they gave every one vouchers to bid for shares of state owned companies. The little people had no idea what they were doing and got screwed brutally. It created many of the ridiculously wealthy Russian oligarchs you see today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privatization_in_Russia

[nhaehnle]

Interesting. The fundamental goal seemed a noble one, but it was badly implemented. Any lessons to take away?

One immediate idea is some kind of vesting, i.e. you can't actually sell your vouchers for X years (or stages, being able to sell certain percentages after a certain number of years).

A second idea is to encourage the formation of public interest associations to manage the ownership. There are already some non-traditional funds run with some social goals in addition to the goal of making money, perhaps that would help. (But I'm really just brainstorming right now.)

[ambicapter]

My knee-jerk reaction is that these people got bit because they weren't educated on the matter, so free education would've been helpful. Incidentally, I feel like that would help with the original problem as well.

I am really starting to think that government should reduce the cost of education as a public good.

[Florin_Andrei]

It could be argued that the population over there was very unprepared to make these choices - 3 generations of communism tend to shape your thinking in interesting ways.

[d883kd8]

> equity based social security or welfare payments

I seem to remember Bush II proposing this early in his first term. I was quite young at the time, but I remember some some stuff about "Ownership Society" and a scheme that boiled down to "let's take the social security money and invest it."

[jqm]

I wasn't that young at the time and maybe I'm a cynic, but what I heard was "let's take the social security money and let my campaign contributors skim off the top".

I also heard him talking about ownership in the sense everyone should own a home. Right at the peak of the housing bubble. Lots of people took a big hit.

[mathattack]

There was talk of turning social security into private investment vehicles. (Similar to a 401K) Lots of problems with that, but the current system isn't so great either.

What I'm trying to get at here though isn't just turning people into equity investors, but specifically capturing the upside from an environment where robots do all the work and the gains are captured mostly by an oligopoly of their makers.

If the robots (or AI) are broadly created and owned, this is much less of a problem.

[loup-vaillant]

If World War 2 counts as "social unrest", I'd say Einstein got à point.

[mathattack]

World War 2 wasn't caused by too much productivity.

[loup-vaillant]

It appears World War 2 came from fascism… which came from fed up people… because massive unemployment… because failure to handle productivity increases.

Productivity increases by itself will never cause problem. If we become 1000 times more productive overnight, we have loads of excellent solutions to handle it. Like have people work only 1 day per year, relying on voluntary service, increase material wealth like crazy…

But we've gotta admit, our society sucks at absorbing productivity increases. Just watch what will happen to professional drivers in the 10, 15 years to come. If we don't come up with something, the shock will be brutal.

[analyst74]

When people think state owned enterprises, they think the failed USSR and communism ideal.

A more recent and viable model to look at is probably some of the successful Sovereign wealth fund, like Norway, UAE, Qatar and etc.

[mathattack]

I was thinking Singapore, but is that scalable?

[pen2l]

> Many great scientists (Einstein amongst them) get into trouble when they veer into Economics. Einstein predicted social unrest from massive unemployment due to productivity improvements. Productivity improvements help people in aggregate.

Can you please expand? I did not know of this

[Umn55]

His own words:

https://monthlyreview.org/2009/05/01/why-socialism/