[philipkglass]

That threat has many thinkers entertaining the idea of a universal basic income, a guaranteed living wage paid by the government to anyone left out of the workforce. But McAfee believes this would only make the problem worse, because it would eliminate the incentive for entrepreneurship and other activity that could create new jobs as the old ones fade away. Others question the psychological effects of the idea. “A universal basic income doesn’t give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice,” Etzioni says.

It's funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we're talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...?

Some people sound like they're planning how to invent enough bullshit jobs to provide everyone a regular 9-5 schedule and a supervisor even after machines are doing all the strictly necessary labor. It's like the worst of the Protestant work ethic married to the worst proposals from Keynesianism, so it's one of those special bad ideas that people from all parts of the political spectrum can endorse. I'd rather trust adults to find their own amusements and purpose, like we trust adults who today have income-without-regular-labor, and trust the robo-police to curb those whose boredom turns to criminality.

[TheSmiddy]

The idea that giving someone just enough money to live will kill their motivation is insane. If that were true why do people still work 40+ hour weeks when they could be earning enough to live on just 15? Most UBI schemes are initially targeting around 1k per month which is nowhere near enough satisfy the vast majority of people.

[gozur88]

>If that were true why do people still work 40+ hour weeks when they could be earning enough to live on just 15?

There are all sorts of practical reasons why it's difficult to work 15 hours every week, the biggest of which is employers don't want to hire you. If you're flipping burgers, sure, but it's pretty rare to find that arrangement for a professional job.

[nojvek]

When everyone working 40 hours they are getting paid a lot more. They can afford high rents and mortgages. Even as a software engineer I struggle with rent and don't leave much for savings.

When a robot is doing low skilled jobs and education is insanely expensive like it is now, the gap is inevitable.

Capital buys AI allowing one person to do the work of many and reap the rewards of it. America is built on this very idea.

[vegiraghav]

well robots arent just doing low skilled jobs here. They are on the verge of replacing many white collaar jobs

[drvdevd]

This is an important point. AI could replace many programmers for example. Or make better investment decisions.

It has the potential to kill the entire notion of wealth as we currently know it, regardless of social standing.

What then?

[Snowe]

The fear is that capital will own all the means of production and services and what then of everyone else? Hope UBI is implement? Or perhaps become more self-sufficient? The hype around 3D printing seems to have died down. I guess a lot of grand visions weren't realised and a lot of cheap trinkets printed instead but it still contains an idea that should be nurtured: robotics and AI at the grass roots level. Don't let capital own all the means of sufficiency.

[pavlov]

Sounds like a way forward. The current notion of wealth is toxic: an incongruent patchwork of ancient and modern ideas of what's valuable. It limits mankind's potential.

[pizza]

White collar/services jobs are a lot easier for robots to perform than blue collar ones (Moravec's paradox). The untapped potential of being able to sell "the one company that does every service task with a credit card form factor" will probably make it more profitable to attempt to outcompete the low-hanging fruit: higher-cost (so more likely to "go viral") and easier to implement professional jobs. It might just be AI that makes Marx's accelerationism a household term!

[Bombthecat]

Not only America, the whole world

[harryf]

Our ideas about motivation are shaped by self fulfilling prophecy; most people are on the planet a working jobs which are, at best, a compromise for what they want to do with their lives. As a result staying motivated is hard because you're ultimately doing it just for the money.

So yeah; let's give large numbers of people a chance to try doing what they want with their lives. Yes it will not be easy. More education will be required, some will need support to not fall into drug abuse etc but ultimately it could lead to a better human condition

[michaelbarton]

I very much agree with you. Related to the parent comment I think it's not so much about killing their motivation, more a case that many people's skills will no longer be, or already are not needed. My simple theory about the current political anger in the US is that it's not so much money, though still important, that hurts people from unemployment. Instead I think that it is feeling that you are no longer needed by society or the people around you that hurts the most. I imagine that it must be existentially distressful to feel that you have nothing to contribute and very likely never will again.

The Dalai Lama puts it better than I can:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/04/opinion/dalai-lama-behind...

My guess is that in additional to a basic income, you'll need to find a way to make people feel that they are needed and useful. I think it's easy for the men and women on HN, who tend to be the go-getter type to say that they would start up a business or take up painting. However I think we could all probably learn learn a little from the unemployed factory worker in Akron Ohio about what would they do with basic income, unlimited free time, but limited job prospects.

[sokoloff]

It's also worth noting that $1K per month for all US citizens would represent materially more than 100% of the current federal tax.

US Citizens: Couldn't find a readily available reliable source, so I'll use residents instead. Should be close enough for this math though I'd imagine this would be more likely a citizen program rather than a resident program.

US Residents: ~325 million

Federal Tax Revenue 2016 - ~3.27 trillion

Federal Tax Revenue - ~272 billion / month

Federal Tax Revenue - ~$850 / resident / month

What if we didn't give it to minors?

US residents over 18 - ~247 million

Federal Tax Revenue - ~$1100 / resident-over-18 / month

That's if we spent it all on UBI, no debt service, no federal employees, no military, no infrastructure spending, no social security, no pensions (even for federal employees who earned them and are legally and morally entitled to them), etc.

[pzone]

Well, we're imagining a world where robots have made us vastly richer. (Self-driving cars! 100% automated factories!) Stark increases in inequality will also mean that more of the US' total income is given to the highest earners, i.e. those with the highest tax brackets. So we'd collect quite a lot more in taxes even if we left current rates completely unchanged.

If robots don't end up making society incredibly wealthy and more unequal then there's no point in UBI to begin with. So it doesn't make sense to simply look at current figures.

[sokoloff]

Agreed that current figures don't tell the whole story, but it's at least as unwise to not consider the current figures to get a sense of order-of-magnitude.

[shams93]

It needs to be indexed to GDP, it should not be welfare it should be each citizen's cut of the machine driven GDP. That won't stop people from forming new kinds of human markets and selling their art, or doing things like benefitting from a scientific breakthrough, people who own the machines may benefit the most, but if you tie it to GDP and its a cut of the economy rather than a welfare check far fewer people will sit around and get loaded. They will be motivated to do the thing that everyone told them "don't quit your day job" for, the dreams of childhood coming into manifestation for the masses for thee first time in human history.

[cnnsucks]

"why do people still work 40+ hour weeks"

Mostly it's about upbringing. People are taught to have expectations for themselves and they strive to fulfill them. 15h would be bare subsistence for most, and that's not good enough. The minute they can live their expectations without work they usually check out; e.g. 45 year old "retired" government workers bankrupting their muni/county/state with union negotiated pensions.

[gech]

Both something that doesn't exist, and also something you've mischaracterized. Pensions are delayed payments for work already done.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Defined-benefit pension schemes are a problem because now, with the baby-boomers retiring, we're finding that we can't afford it. Many people can expect to live to 100 - that's 35 years of retirement after 45 years of employment when their employer probably only set-aside 10-15% of an employee's income for investment in the pension when it should have been 25-30% - so now the younger generations are paying for it - by using revenue generated from their activities to pay for the defined-benefit schemes which cuts into their salaries - and making them work longer years to make up for their own contributions.

[mathgeek]

> Many people can expect to live to 100

Do we have an actual source for this yet? Anecdotally, I still see about 7 out of every 8 deaths in my social circles occurring before 90, with a notable number before 70.

[cnnsucks]

>> Pensions are delayed payments for work already done.

That's your view, not mine. Bankrupt governments are a fact for the both of us.

[fictioncircle]

> It's funny how boredom, vice, and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor loom in importance if and only if we're talking about technological unemployment. What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...?

It is largely a desire for a control mechanism where the sheep are inherently dependent on the mechanism to eat.

The retired pensioners and independently wealthy are both largely willing to sustain the status quo without substantial, rapid change.

The scary thing to people at the top of the ladder is what happens when it isn't just those two segments of the population? What happens when you have millions of rebellious young people completely free of the 9-5 to grind to survive?

They don't know if the answer supports the status quo and to them its a scary unknown.

[roryisok]

I'm not against Universal Basic Income, but there are some things about it which worry me, and which don't seem to come up very much in these discussions.

leverage

If we're all on basic income, we no longer have any leverage if our "wages" are reduced. The ruling classes can decide to drop the amount we earn, and there's not much we can do about it. Sure, we can "vote", but we can't strike, which is a far more powerful way to fight against pay decreases.

education

the main driving force behind education is the need for employment. of course plenty of people seek education purely for their own fulfilment, and we imagine with the free time that will come with joblessness, more people will do this. but we'll almost certainly see a drop in the number of young people attending college, since there's no "need". with less people in college, the overall level of education around the world will drop.

[dragonwriter]

> If we're all on basic income, we no longer have any leverage if our "wages" are reduced. [...] Sure, we can "vote", but we can't strike, which is a far more powerful way to fight against pay decreases.

Actually, if no one needs your labor (which is the only situation in which you have BI but not actual wages) you can't strike, whether or not you are getting BI. The loss of leverage is a result of the declining demand for labor, not the presence of UBI redistributing income.

[fictioncircle]

> If we're all on basic income, we no longer have any leverage if our "wages" are reduced. The ruling classes can decide to drop the amount we earn, and there's not much we can do about it. Sure, we can "vote", but we can't strike, which is a far more powerful way to fight against pay decreases.

You could still strike. UBI has nothing to do with employment and it enables you to sustain strikes longer as you are guaranteed income regardless of employment status. (i.e. you won't starve)

> the main driving force behind education is the need for employment. of course plenty of people seek education purely for their own fulfilment, and we imagine with the free time that will come with joblessness, more people will do this. but we'll almost certainly see a drop in the number of young people attending college, since there's no "need". with less people in college, the overall level of education around the world will drop.

Tbh, I think many "creative" majors go into creative majors (despite the economic practicality) because they want to. (i.e. Art, English)

[thatguy0900]

What exactly are you striking if the robots create everything? I'm not sure what you could withhold that would upset the government. I guess you could stop consuming things, but you don't have the money to consume very much anyway on just UBI.

[fictioncircle]

We are a long way from SkyNet and self maintaining robots.

Realistically, the robots are simply going to replace Fast Food workers and such like they do in factories. (i.e. massively reduced but non-0 employment) UBI assumes people work but not nesc. full time and sufficient to take care of all of their needs.

If it gets to the point where you have no ability to earn any money for anyone, well, no offense you are probably screwed no matter the government unless its very benevolent. The forces you are talking about are wholly independent of UBI's existence.

Frankly, the belief that "lowering UBI" will be tolerated amuses me because the US has a UBI-esque system for the retired and it has the largest, most powerful lobbying organization in the US.

[AnthonyMouse]

> but we'll almost certainly see a drop in the number of young people attending college, since there's no "need".

More likely the opposite. Making $12K/year sucks. You can make $12K/year + 17K/year by flipping burgers, but that still sucks. Much better to go to college and then make $12K/year + 70K/year.

And a UBI allows more people to do that because it reduces the risk of quitting a bad job to go to school.

[Bombthecat]

The jobs for that would still be not there...

So, why go to school?

[AnthonyMouse]

> The jobs for that would still be not there...

> So, why go to school?

You would obviously go to school for the jobs that are still there.

And if there hypothetically aren't any then what difference would a UBI make to that?

[e12e]

Why do you read hn? Is part of the motivation to learn something new?

[dvtv75]

As far as leverage goes, my present employer relies entirely on there being little alternative to what he offers. If I had a UBI, that would remove his leverage and I could leave - and I would, in a heartbeat.

Why work for almost no money every week, why work extra hours for free just to satisfy an incompetent's power lust if you don't have to?

[jacobolus]

Wait, what? If people don’t need to work full time to nominally survive, that gives them much more leverage vs. employers.

The BATNA during labor negotiations is now “live a spare lifestyle on basic income” vs. “let your whole family die starving in a gutter”.

[the_watcher]

He's speaking about leverage against the provider of UBI, who can simply lower or remove it.

[jacobolus]

Aha. Well that’s no different from any other public service, subsidy, or restriction then. The “leverage” is voting, the specific content of legislation/regulation, and the legal system, and if those don’t work mass protest.

For instance, “the ruling classes” could just as easily decide tomorrow to cut road maintenance, police response to violent crime, fire departments, emergency rooms, public schools, food stamps, public pension plans, access to parks, agricultural subsidies, grants for scientific research, government-backed loan programs, access to wifi spectrum, air pollution controls, carefully controlled monetary policy, bank deposit insurance, ....

[finnh]

OP is talking about leverage against the government should they decide to lower the BI level.

[Stanleyc23]

Speaking of leverage, if UBI money can be used towards credit cards, we might expect to see even more people get hooked in perpetual credit card debt. Always just enough cash to swipe the plastic, never enough to wipe away the debt.

[fictioncircle]

Yes, but no more than we do with social security and our existing system realistically. And the threat of repeated bankruptcies by UBI folks is likely enough of a threat to keep it from getting out of hand (and if it does, its the credit card companies that get burned by the bankruptcies).

[sokoloff]

If UBI is garnishable/attachable, credit card companies could simply wait to get paid from a slice of future UBI payments, meaning there might be increased risk of over-extension.

(I haven't thought deeply enough about whether it should or shouldn't be garnishable. I lean towards the idea that it shouldn't, but then that makes it less valuable in certain ways.)

[fictioncircle]

http://www.creditcards.com/credit-card-news/sally-herigstad-...

> Another rule is that they cannot take more than the excess of your earnings over 30 times the federal minimum hourly wage (currently $7.25 per hour). That means $217.50 per week (30 X $7.25) is safe from any garnishment at all.

307.2552 = $11,310

You are largely immune to garnishment on a $12k/year UBI (for instance) under existing law. Bankruptcy would likely remove any garnishment if you only had UBI. I'm not a lawyer but the impression I have is pretty much under $20k, very little garnishment will occur due to:

A) Costs of recovery

B) The bankruptcy process favors the poor person declaring bankruptcy in terms of who walks away with "more".

I highly suspect the current floor on how much of your wages can be garnished would be kept equal to UBI and no one extends substantial credit to people on UBI for that reason.

[ryanmarsh]

LOL. Millions of young men with housing and food and nothing to do. You just described a standing army.

[fictioncircle]

That is the traditional method of UBI. Military expansionism. ;)

[pizza]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparta#Economy

[ar0]

The topics of "boredom, vice and the indignity of receiving income without continual labor" come up whenever there is unearned income (from the point of view of the recipient). In this area, UBI and welfare benefits are very different from pensions, royalties or rents which - from the point of view of the recipient - have all been earned (through prior work) and thus don't come with indignity / stigma attached.

Inherited wealth is in some ways comparable and this is why there exist many examples where heirs have ruined family fortunes by desparately trying to make their own mark. (And many heirs of family fortunes would probably score high on the "vice" rankings, too.)

Look (because these posts don't seem to sit well with the HN crowd): I'm not against a UBI. I'm just saying that it will not solve all the problems. Getting people money to live is only one piece of the equation. Making it socially acceptable (both regarding the inside perspective of the recipients themselves and their self-esteem as well as regarding the outside view of society) to live off of UBI instead of being in regular employment will IMHO be far more challenging and will take time (maybe generations).

[notahacker]

Inherited wealth is if anything a generous comparison, since those eligible to inherit wealth are often encouraged by their parents to jump through sizeable work-ethic related hoops to ensure their inheritance, and inheritance is usually with good reason more heavily taxed than most money transfers. UBI is all about assuming that it's entirely unreasonable to set thresholds of need or effort to state handouts when we could instead deny them to people solely on more reasonable criteria like whether they had the decency to be born in a particular country.

So yeah, I actually am against UBI for the foreseeable future, regardless of how well that sits with the HN crowd. Since in the real world we're a very long way from hard AI, replicators and post scarcity economics, UBI is - at best - redistributing from each according to his ability to each according to their ability to prove they're not a foreigner. Sure, the world isn't particularly fair anyway, but let's not pretend it's a step in the right direction to removing any assumption the welfare state is supposed to be a social insurance system for people that have paid into the system and are genuinely looking for work, and replacing it with the ethos that $nationals have a fundamental and inalienable entitlement to the fruits of other's labour (mostly non-entitled foreigners') if they're not particularly interested in trying to earn it themselves.

(Of course there are plenty of arguments against UBI that don't rely on notions of "dignity of work" like the important practical question of how much you're willing to slash existing welfare or raise taxes to give state handouts to much larger numbers of people that haven't indicated they need or want them, but that's probably a tangent to this particular article)

[chrisbennet]

As far as the "wealth redistribution" goes, currently the 8 richest men have as much wealth as the poorest 50% (3.6 Billion) of the worlds population. [1] Capturing wealth is not the same as earning it. Wealth has already been "redistributed" to a wealthy few.

[1] http://fortune.com/2017/01/16/world-richest-men-income-equal...

[AnthonyMouse]

The anti-nationalist argument makes no sense given that we don't provide most existing forms of social assistance to non-citizens either, and anyway there is no inherent reason that a UBI couldn't be provided to non-citizen legal residents if people so desired it.

[notahacker]

Existing forms of social assistance in Western countries often are available to non-citizens and are usually more strongly linked to past payments into the system and/or intention to work and contribute to the system when they can. For obvious practical reasons (a suggested stipend of $10k PPP is well above the median salary internationally) if one destroys the link with work contributions, then numbers must be managed by imposing more onerous restrictions on non-citizens' entitlement to move to a country and claim subsidies higher than they presently earn. And however unjust it might already be, the existing systems that mandates employment for foreigners seeking residency generally aren't built on the concept that it's an affront to dignity to impose work requirements on citizens wanting handouts.

But the wider point is that the "nobody should be forced to suffer the indignity of having to work for their living" rhetoric behind UBI simply doesn't reflect any feasible near-term system that any person has actually proposed, and the "people should not have to work unless they were born elsewhere, in which case their continued labour to produce low cost goods for those who have chosen to become permanent UBI-dependents is fundamental to the system getting close to being affordable" reality is a bit less philosophically appealing.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Existing forms of social assistance in Western countries often are available to non-citizens and are usually more strongly linked to past payments into the system and/or intention to work and contribute to the system when they can.

Most social assistance programs in the US are not linked to past payments, the most notable exception being social security, which pays only retirees.

And limiting benefits to people who have previously paid has the effect you seem to dislike anyway -- new arrivals to the country can't collect benefits because they have no history of paying.

Moreover, redistributive programs can't work that way because their entire premise is to improve the situation of lower income people. If the money had to go to people in proportion to what they've paid then it would have no purpose or effect.

> For obvious practical reasons (a suggested stipend of $10k PPP is well above the median salary internationally) if one destroys the link with work contributions, then numbers must be managed by imposing more onerous restrictions on non-citizens' entitlement to move to a country and claim subsidies higher than they presently earn.

We already have this because the existing programs already work this way. If anyone from an impoverished country could immediately immigrate legally to the US and begin collecting food and housing assistance, an unsustainable number of people would, which is why they aren't allowed to. Even if they could find a job here in e.g. agriculture, because those jobs don't qualify for H1B.

> And however unjust it might already be, the existing systems that mandates employment for foreigners seeking residency generally aren't built on the concept that it's an affront to dignity to impose work requirements on citizens wanting handouts.

Then it's a good thing a UBI isn't built on that, since its purpose is to provide a safety net without creating the poverty trap that existing means-tested programs do by withdrawing benefits at rates approaching or sometimes even exceeding 100% of marginal income for low and middle income people.

> But the wider point is that the "nobody should be forced to suffer the indignity of having to work for their living" rhetoric behind UBI simply doesn't reflect any feasible near-term system that any person has actually proposed, and the "people should not have to work unless they were born elsewhere, in which case their continued labour to produce low cost goods for those who have chosen to become permanent UBI-dependents is fundamental to the system getting close to being affordable" reality is a bit less philosophically appealing.

The idea that one country should have to pay for social assistance for the whole world in order to have it internally is not a philosophy most people are going to mind disregarding.

[notahacker]

> Then it's a good thing a UBI isn't built on that, since its purpose is to provide a safety net without creating the poverty trap that existing means-tested programs do by withdrawing benefits at rates approaching or sometimes even exceeding 100% of marginal income for low and middle income people.

You're responding to an entire subthread revolving around the idea that the great benefit of UBI is that it allows adults (except foreign ones) to "find their own amusements and purpose" and avoid "bullshit jobs" and the social acceptability of it as a permanent and exclusive income source...

There are many ways of designing welfare systems to avoid the "welfare trap" of excessive effective marginal rates of income taxation, of which UBI is probably the least efficient.

The only argument which favours UBI over more modest alternate welfare reforms more specifically targeted at reducing benefit withdrawal rates at the margin is the frequently-made philosophical argument that it's fundamentally unreasonable if not immoral to make handouts contingent on willingness to work and pressure them to take jobs. I'm simply pointing out that few, if any of the people making that argument are opposed to subjecting foreigners to similar indignities if they seek to enter the country, and moreover the sustainability of a UBI is entirely dependent on people not lucky enough to be citizens needing to work for a living for the foreseeable future.

Needless to say, advocates of systems of social assistance not built on the principle that it's entirely unreasonable to ask people to work and/or assess their fitness to do so are not guilty of the same level of staggering hypocrisy when accepting the status quo of work requirements and thresholds imposed on foreigners seeking to enter a country.

[Florin_Andrei]

Boredom quickly becomes a non-issue when the real issue is starvation.

I'd love to get to the point where the main problem is being bored. I fear that, if the current social and political dogmas don't change, a heck of a lot of people will get kicked to the curb once AI-driven automation really takes off.

[xg15]

A point i'm always surprised is not discussed much in the basic income debate is loss of control.

Whenever a job is performed by a person, that person has the power to refuse doing the job or put their own spin on it. The effect is that there some basic checks of ethics. This keeps businesses from doing things blatantly against the interests of society and ensures that CEOs with grand visions of shaping humanity are forced to discuss their ideas with others before implementing them.

All that is not true if a major part of society is not part of the work process. In the extreme, that could make the old "bond villain with robot army" scenario actually credible. But more realistically, it could lead to large and important aspects of society being under unchecked control by a relatively small number of people. This is already true today with communication and data collection (e.g. google/apple/etc can push arbitrary updates to billions of phones around the world without any sort of oversight) and it will likely be the same with transport and manufacturing in the future.

I fear basic income not only doesn't address this problem but even worsens it by declaring it normal that a large part of society does not take part at all in shaping that society.

[dllthomas]

Many things that people do without it being "a job" have a significant impact on shaping society. To the degree that your concern is legitimate (and I think to some degree it is) it is a concern about automation irrespective of basic income.

[ryandrake]

Basic Income will never be politically possible in places where it's culturally expected that a living must be "earned". It's more likely we'll end up paying 50% of the population to dig holes and paying the other 50% to fill them in, than implementing a basic income.

[laughfactory]

This is so true. You could argue we already have this occurring in the US, for example. I've worked many places where it's unclear exactly why it requires so many people doing their various jobs to keep the business afloat. I've even held various positions which seemed like that: some days I would dig holes, other days I'd fill them in (metaphorically). I'm not sure how this happens in private industry, maybe because of various incentives from the government? Tax breaks, etc.?

[crdoconnor]

In the United States you have plenty of holes that need to be dug (crumbling infrastructure) and a historically low labor force participation level and some people are still arguing that the cost of employing people to dig them is too high while arguing that BI will be necessary very soon because robots.

[tluyben2]

... never ...

It'll take a few generations probably. If living cannot be 'earned' for the majority, it'll be done fast enough with that opinion.

[shams93]

Exactly we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs we could put the pedal to the metal in human freedom and innovation.

[wozniacki]

Putting aside our political slants, one might ask when exactly in the history of human civilization has any fraction of humanity ever consistently demonstrated that they were willing to devote themselves to the sole pursuit of "the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery" for any significant length of time?

If such instances existed, did those noble pursuits come without costs? To either themselves or others?

Say they did manage to exist in harmony with other civilizations (who may not have had any such lofty ideals or pursuits) then how long did they manage to keep doing so? [1] [2]

How long did they survive?

How long did their inventions or works of knowledge survive, in their intended forms?

In fact the evidence is to the contrary that when humans are bequeathed with a surfeit of riches and time to devote, they indulged in decadence, degeneracy and if nothing else sloth.

At which time, they were quickly wiped off by their geopolitical peers who placed a higher importance on self-preservation than they did on arts, science & discovery.

We like to think we have ridden ourselves from the shortsightedness of those older, less-prudent & ill-advised civilizations.

But really, on balance, have we?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sea_Peoples

[2] http://www.ancient.eu/Sea_Peoples/

[vacri]

"oriented around" != "sole pursuit". You're making a strawman by inserting an overly-high bar.

However, the USA in the 50s and 60s matches your demand. An incredibly wealthy time, it was also a golden age of modern art and a golden age of science in so many fields. The moon shot itself cost 4% of the USA's GDP. How well did these advances survive? The cultural waves turned out to be the origin of the USA's soft power, with movies, music, and fashion spreading out throughout the world like nothing before. And much of the science continues to be the bedrock of science, engineering, and manufacturing today.

[waqf]

People are already creating more art than we actually need (witness how hard it is to make a living as an artist). Now just wait till the AIs become serious competition at that too.

[wilkommen]

The amount of money someone can make in our economy as an artist isn't a reflection of how much art we "need." Art in particular is not a commodity that society can just have enough of. And in general, the price something fetches in our economy isn't always a reflection of its value to society. See: salaries of social workers, emergency medical technicians, etc.

[lowpro]

Everything, including art, follows supply and demand. Value is the point where they meet. Salaries of social works and EMTs are where the supply of those positions meet the need for those positions in any certain area.

Art has a defined supply and demand, where the supply is high and demand is low (probably due to the fact you can buy copies of famous masterpieces for very cheap).

[AnthonyMouse]

> Everything, including art, follows supply and demand.

It isn't about supply and demand, it's about transaction costs.

Suppose you could create a work of art that fifty million people would each value at 25c, so total value of two million dollars. Far more than enough to pay your wages for a year. But if you actually try to charge them, the credit card company wants 30c + 3% per person (consuming more than the entire value) and other payment mechanisms suffer similarly infeasible costs in money or inconvenience or otherwise.

But if we would pay the artist unconditionally and then they create art and give it away, we would get two million dollars worth of art for $12,000 and with no transaction costs.

Meanwhile this allows some of the artists to become famous and then charge prices for their art that exceed the transaction costs, and now they're paying taxes and funding the UBI for the next generation of artists/inventors/experimentalists/etc.

[waqf]

What happens when a competitor creates a substitute artwork (i.e. one that competes for market share with the original artwork) and sells it at 24¢?

[AnthonyMouse]

And obviously to total $2M at 25c requires 8M customers rather than 50M if you actually divide by .25 instead of multiplying by 25, so that's even easier.

[dublinben]

What is the value of the Sistene Chapel? How much would it cost to make a second one?

[pizza]

While in theory art would be efficiently transferred from the ideal seller (artist) to ideal buyer (rich #1 fan), in practice the idea that information falls in the right hands automagically is kinda laughable

[thatguy0900]

Once ai starts making better art than humans it might be able to improve itself better than humans as well. At that point we don't need humans either. Still nice to keep us around though.

[edblarney]

"we could have a society oriented around the arts and sciences, pure creativity and discovery instead of bullshit jobs "

I'm afraid your statement implies a misunderstanding of what 'the economy' is.

'The economy' is people providing services and building products for one another.

So that guy who waited on you at the restaurant, the girl who did your payroll, the guy who delivered your mail, the person monitoring your blocks internet connections, the person who planted crops, the person making sure your street is safe to walk down ...

Those 'bullshit jobs' all exist for a reason - because they provide value to someone (like you), and we are willing to pay for it all by doing stuff for others as well.

'The jobs' that we do are a function of what other people in the economy 'want done' in terms of products and services.

Not a function of 'what they want to do'.

If you don't want to do anything that 'helps others' - that's fine, but you can't expect for them to help you in return if your 'lifestyle choice' is 'windsurfing'.

But when we do help each other, the whole is actually greater than the sum of the parts (i.e. comparative value) - and that's where we really start to win.

Most of the things you need done for you are not that fun. It'll always be that way.

[andai]

Most of them can be automated.

[edblarney]

True, but not for a very long time.

The day someone that can make a robot to clean my bathroom and then make me a ham sandwich, I'll get worried.

In the meantime, other industries like sports, entertainment, tourism, etc. expand.

One are that will be the last to be automated is 'taking care of the elderly' - it's human-intense and that market is only expanding.

[andai]

I wish you were right.

I wish it were 50 years off.

Life, however, has other plans:

https://arstechnica.com/business/2017/02/how-being-replaced-...

(Incidentally there's actually a gif of a robot cooking in there.)

[masonic]

Do you see much "creativity and discovery" coming out of present-day homeless shelters and encampments?

[industriousthou]

I mean, the whole idea is that if people have their basic needs met, they'll be able to be more creative and productive. Homeless people are the perfect counter example.

[Turing_Machine]

No. Homeless people almost all have mental illness, substance abuse problems, or some combination of the two.

I'm not seeing why you and the OP think they are representative of the general population in any way. They are, pretty much by definition, people who are too messed up to function in society.

[knieveltech]

You couldn't be more wrong here. Have some facts:

https://www.nlchp.org/documents/Homeless_Stats_Fact_Sheet

[Turing_Machine]

Posting a link to a spun document from an advocacy group doesn't actually prove me wrong.

For example, "sleeping in public places not meant for human habitation" would include anyone who has ever taken a nap in the airport, even one time.

When the piece starts out with an obviously bogus definition, there's really not much point in going through it point by point. It has zero credibility from the start.

Other sources (easily found by Google) suggest that up to 2/3 of the real chronic homeless population has problems with alcohol and/or other substances

[industriousthou]

Why wouldn't people with mental illness or substance abuse problems be able to be creative and productive if their basic needs were met?

[rifung]

Sorry if this is a dumb question but do homeless people fit the description since I'd think they still have to spend time begging?

[gdeghtfg]

"creativity" in Arts and Sciences (like academia in general) is driven by a silly popularity game.

It is as BS as are lives across the spectrum. Far off mountains appear hospitable indeed.

[crazy2be]

It does come up?

In the case of pensions and royalties, it is wealth from prior work, so it's not really in the same category morally (for a culture that believes in the virtue of work).

Social security and inherited wealth definately do have a sort of stigma attached to them though, precisely because of the lifestyles that "trust fund children" tend to live, and because the poor are already stigmatized in general. The structure of social security makes real problems here too, where people can't get jobs without losing their social security.

[philipkglass]

Maybe I haven't been listening at the right times, but I've never heard someone suggesting that we should raise the retirement age or cut Social Security benefits because old people will be bored or lack dignity if they're not compelled to remain in waged labor. (I have heard other arguments for raising the retirement age or cutting benefits, but not the they-must-remain-busy argument).

A freestanding belief in the "virtue of work" is one of those pathologies that I hope we can leave behind as machines do more. Many good things in life can be accomplished only with hard work. It's good to be able to work hard, that you may accomplish good things. There is no virtue in doing hard, purposeless work[1] after you run out of hard, purposeful work. If a person wants to keep starting fires using flint and steel after the invention of the friction match, that's fine if they enjoy it. It's a little worrisome but not really my problem if they keep doing it the hard way because they feel guilty otherwise. It's a real problem if they want everyone else to keep behaving as if the friction match were never invented, because they've confused "a valuable outcome from difficult work" with "an inherent virtue found in difficult work."

[1] Of course you don't want to let your body atrophy from disuse, but there's no reason that exercising your muscles and your senses needs to resemble paid-labor-as-it-used-to-be. People hike and go rafting for fun. Nobody needs to dig ditches for fun. You can keep your body and mind well maintained without imitating obsolete jobs.

[RandomOpinion]

"Early Retirement May Be The Kiss Of Death, Study Finds": http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/early-retirement-may-be-...

"Study: Later retirement may help prevent dementia": http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/07/15/study-r...

Other references are easy to find. Giving up the structure and purpose of one's life and building a new one on your own is not an easy transition to make, regardless of what young people think.

[sologoub]

On "trust fund children", the lifestyle of a few loud examples is likely painting an unrepresentative picture to the masses. I'd love to see some real stats or study on people who inherited substantial wealth.

On one hand, society seems to argue that inherited privilege perpetuates itself, which means that wealthy offspring are succeeding, sometimes despite their abilities.

On the other, we have the stereotype of "trust fund babies" who by conventional wisdom don't amount to much and don't contribute to society.

So which is it - is inherited wealth a road to success or failure? Likely, both with outcome dependent on other factors then wealth.

If anyone has a good study to read on this that actually took more than anecdotal evidence, I'd love to read it.

[jedberg]

A good documentary on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8o46HH-TfNY

It's called Born Rich, and it's by Jamie Johnson, one of the heirs of the Johnson & Johnson empire. Ironically, he chose to do this endeavor despite not needing to work.

[ryandrake]

It depends on your definition of success. The offspring of the wealthy tend to remain wealthy, regardless of whether or not they "contribute to society". If you consider wealth perpetuation success then they are succeeding.

[sologoub]

The original post talks about money and how non-earned income streams carry a stigma, so for relevancy to the discussion, success is accumulation and maintenance of wealth.

[nodamage]

I don't see the contradiction? If you inherit a lot of wealth you're likely to remain wealthy. Simultaneously you may not be motivated to work much and contribute to society.

[sologoub]

So how do you remain wealthy if, following the social stigma, you make all the "wrong decisions" and squander the money?

Maintaining wealth takes work too.

[nodamage]

I think if you inherit a large enough amount of wealth it's actually really difficult to squander unless you're intentionally trying to.

[stuaxo]

The stigma that trust fund kids face is nothing compared to what people on benefits face.

In Britain channel 5 has a whole subgenre of programmes about people on benefits, while similarly the Daily Express runs articles about the most extreme cases.

[vacri]

> “A universal basic income doesn’t give people dignity or protect them from boredom and vice,”

It may not give them dignity, but it protects them from poverty, which strips dignity. It also protects them from vice-based-on-need, just not vice-based-on-boredom.

[kitd]

What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...?

Earned income is directly or indirectly linked to how you perceive society values you, and therefore your self-esteem. Pensions have been earned previously, royalties earned by your intellect, even inheritance is earnings by your family. A life on social security is known to lower self-esteem. Most recipients are desperate to work.

The UBI undercuts this to some extent. It may be part of the answer, but it is only a small part IMHO.

[zeteo]

> What of people receiving Social Security, pensions, inherited wealth, royalties from patents and copyrights, rents collected on real estate...?

Not exactly the definition of the creative class is it?

[philipkglass]

Before governments started heavily funding scientific research in the 20th century, most basic science was done as some wealthy person's hobby. Of course there were far more aristocrats who were interested in using their moneyed leisure to (e.g.) race horses than to experiment with electricity or identify new insect species, but some were driven by curiosity. (If you remember the Web in the 1990s, there was also a lot of amazing creativity that found an outlet via personal passion-sites that had nothing to do with earning an income.)

If nobody really needed to work I think that's it quite possible that the huge population multiplied by a tiny percentage of people spontaneously taking up a creative pursuit (science, music, writing, mathematics, sculpture, animation...) could provide us with a "creative class" of a decent size. How many contemporaries of Henry Cavendish were born with comparable latent curiosity but left no scientific discoveries behind because they had to work in the fields all their lives instead of inheriting wealth? I personally stopped pursuing scientific research and started writing software (very little of it truly novel) because the wages and employment situation are so much better with software. If I didn't have to worry about income ever again I'd spend more time on truly novel interests. It's kind of sad if other people would use their newfound freedom from waged labor to rot on a couch in front of the TV, but not so concerning that I'd assign them a self improvement life-nanny.

[mathgeek]

> It's kind of sad if other people would use their newfound freedom from waged labor to rot on a couch in front of the TV, but not so concerning that I'd assign them a self improvement life-nanny.

I find it somewhat interesting that in our push to use UBI to avoid the destruction of the middle class, we can't seem to get over the idea that most people would still spend some time being productive and some time being entertained. It's not a matter of "you either spend all your time on the couch, or you spend it all being creative." We know, as a fact, that creativity requires downtime.

[Terr_]

> most basic science was done as some wealthy person's hobby

Also "patronage" systems, where wealthier people would support not-so-wealthy scientists and artists. Presumably the patrons derived some social benefit (or personal enjoyment) from being involved in the broader work.

[bijection]

Plenty of scientists, entrepreneurs and creative thinkers have backgrounds that would allow them to subsist with minimal work, and choose to do what they do anyway.

[tnzn]

Heck in countries like France, scientists are paid like shit (I mean, by US standards) and still do unpaid overtime without being forced to.

[moxious]

> Some people sound like they're planning how to invent enough bullshit jobs to provide everyone a regular 9-5 schedule and a supervisor even after machines are doing all the strictly necessary labor.

I think that's mistaken on many fronts. First, new jobs that get invented aren't bullshit. Just as the internet destroyed DVD manufacturing jobs, it created smartphone app jobs, which weren't make-work. Second, the day will never come when machines are doing all of the strictly necessary labor; this is an affectation of the group-think that happens on this site. The firmly established pattern in humanity is that if you automate all of the existing work, humans will start wanting new things, which creates more work. It just....never....stops.

So while I know there are techno-enthusiasts who think AI is so imminent that it can take over even high value knowledge work in the near term, and while I know that "elimination of the middle class through robotics" is a fashionable viewpoint right now, let me just say that I have been reading articles about how strong AI was just around the corner, just a few years off...for the last 20 years. I feel exactly the same way about driverless cars. Every time I pointed that pattern out, someone was always quick to say "this time is different" without really having much evidence why it was. So I guess I'll wait for my thread reply that this time, no, it's really different, AI is going to eat all of the jobs.

I'm enthusiastic about all tech development, but prognostications about the future are pretty much always wrong. Isn't that intuitive? Does anybody really believe they can predict the future?

It's like Star Trek and the 1960s view of what today would be like. Everybody expected matter transporters and flying cars. They didn't get either. But they did get the tricorder.

[philipkglass]

If the market economy keeps producing new jobs fast enough to compensate for technology eliminating old ones, then I agree that we don't need to plan for mass unemployment at all.

But I want to stake out a position early on that if the market economy plus automation does not actually produce enough jobs for job-seekers in practice, then we should accept that mass employment was a historically contingent phenomenon that can be let go. It's not something that governments should try to keep shambling around in zombie form after the original economic rationale has died. (Bullshit jobs invented just to keep people provided with employment/income is one kind of bad response that I'm worried we'll see from protective governments. Another bad response, from neglectful governments, would be to ignore mass technological unemployment observed in practice, should it come to pass, because they're too wedded to a theory that enough new jobs will always arise in the private sector to offset jobs eliminated by automation.)

[computerex]

Everyone knows the AI community failed to deliver on strong AI, the modern boom in automation and machine learning is not about strong AI, rather the exact opposite. Instead of trying to create artificial general intelligence, researchers are now focused on solving very specific problems.

Like speech recognition, or machine vision, or predictive analytics. What's awesome is that deep learning seems to be coming out with the best results across many different disciplines and problem domains, leading to optimism about it being a general technique that can be applied to many different types of complex problems.

So yea, modern renaissance of machine learning and AI is not the same as the promise of strong AI, very opposite.

I am totally with you in that the future is hard to predict. But this isn't quite the same thing, there are notable differences here that'd suggest that this isn't like the promises made by the community since last 50 years.

Speaking specifically about deep learning, never before in history have we been able to work with the sheer volume of data that we now have and can easily work with. GPU computing shits on the CPU and is faster than the CPU by orders of magnitudes for things like matrix multiplication[1]. Advances in the field like dropout, transfer learning, ensemble learning, boosting, convolutional neural networks, unsupervised pre-training, etc have also led to breakthroughs.

Finally, researchers have more access to large freely available datasets like ImageNet, which has had an enormous impact on the field of machine vision. Freely available tools like Caffe, TensorFlow, Theano, Lasagne, Keras, Torch also make it easy for engineers and not machine learning experts to utilize the state of the art techniques to build awesome software.

[1] https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/issues/3320

[moxious]

I understand that modern techniques are different than older approaches and I'm enthusiastic about their potential.

But going from saying that these approaches will improve things to claiming that they'll destroy the middle class and effectively end employment everywhere is a crazy leap that the article and excessively optimistic people often make.

We can agree that the tech is wonderful, but disagree on the future it leads to.

[Shaxberd]

I was going to start the next Apple but $10k a year and the prospect of a leisurely life of 40oz's in the park and generic brand mac n' cheese was enough to kill what overwhelming propensity and drive I had.