[attaboyjon]

The question is how will power be distributed between the owners of the automated plants and the 'subsistence' class? Will there be a true meritocracy, or will the children of the plant owners get all the best jobs? Judging from the way third world economies work, I would not assume the best. This I think is the reason for fear and protectionism.

[rileyteige]

not to mention (at least in the US) that you're handing over a huge political/power pawn. Vastly simplified:

- Party A's candidate is clean and runs on improving infrastructure but that requires a slight cut to UBI

- Party B's candidate has issues regarding corruption, doesn't talk much about infrastructure but promises an increase to the UBI stipend

Which candidate do you think people will vote for?

[michaelmrose]

In the US one party promises free education, free or reduced health care to the majority of the population, etc etc.

This party is still not in power. I don't think its a foregone conclusion that people vote themselves bread and circuses, which is I think your primary point.

On another front I find it hard to believe that UBI if it ever comes to the US will be set anywhere above poverty level. In that context anyone who voted to take money from people in poverty and use it to build roads they would probably be laughed out of office and rightly so.

[RodericDay]

The Democratic party does not credibly propose any of those things. Hillary Clinton explicitly rebuked Bernie Sanders' campaign promises with regards to health and education.

We have not yet seen a candidate running on a socialist proposal coupled with even mediocre or passable mediatic support. Every time a socialist-leaning candidate pops up, moneyed interests work really, really hard against them. However, it's getting better and better (see: Corbyn in UK).

It'll come. People will vote themselves, not bread and circuses, but health and education. And democracy and markets, as opposing decision-making mechanisms, will clash.

[DaiPlusPlus]

> I don't think its a foregone conclusion that people vote themselves bread and circuses, which is I think your primary point.

Or just populism in general - and I think "fear" is a stronger voter-pull than "want": fear of Mexican immigrants committing crimes, taking your job, fear of increased healthcare costs, etc.

As the majority of Americans do have health coverage it's a given that 51% of the population want cheaper coverage even if it means the other 49% will lose coverage then that's going to happen.

[majewsky]

Is it really that simplistic? I would guess many wouldn't vote for cheaper coverage for them if it means that their parents/children/close friends lose coverage.

(Which is why politicians are so busy denying that anyone will lose coverage under their plans.)

[panzagl]

I certainly hope by 'one party' you don't mean the Democrat Party- they've promised nothing of the sort.

If you mean a third party, well than that comes down to lack of trust in that party's ability to execute.

[dragonwriter]

Given the history of trying to build public support for moving UBI from $0 to >$0, probably the former, even if you switch the non-UBI factors, after wealthy interests who aren't on the benefitting side of redistribution get their propaganda in.

“People will always vote for the candidate that promises to increase public benefits they receive” is an attractive myth that doesn't actually play out in practice; in the US, it doesn't even play out in practice in primary elections within the major party most favorably inclined to public benefit programs.

[mars4rp]

" wealthy interests who aren't on the benefitting side of redistribution"

I don't think anybody wants to live in a society where 99% of population are suffering from hunger and lack of basic necessities. There will be no safety in such a society.

but there is always possibility of robot bodyguards!!!

[dragonwriter]

I meant benefiting in the narrow, short-term net payment sense.

I'd agree that there are broader benefits, too.

[majewsky]

I would assume that's because most people right now picture UBI as benefitting only lazy people etc. Once there is a UBI, they'll realize that they're also getting paid, and they'll be more likely to vote against people who want to cut it.

[dragonwriter]

> Once there is a UBI, they'll realize that they're also getting paid

As with existing benefit programs, people will also realize that they are paying. And, as with benefit programs now, even people who are likely to benefit far more from the “being paid” part more than they lose to the “paying” part will often be prone to, and be encouraged by slick propaganda from moneyed interests to, identify with and vote for the interests of those who are on the other side of that equation instead of their own.

[elgenie]

In practice, "people will vote against those who take away public benefits they receive" is probably more accurate in the US.

[qwtel]

> Which candidate do you think people will vote for?

the one that is taller, talks with more confidence and has more gray hair

[shkkmo]

I think it would be important to tie UBI to key economic indicators and put any direct adjustments under the control of economists. We will need to limit politicians control of the purse strings.

[dragonwriter]

> I think it would be important to tie UBI to key economic indicators

Better, just tie it to a defined relationship to a particular revenue stream; if it's capital-income-derived revenue, it's a good theoretical tie to the purpose of compensating for the displacement of labor in industry, and it's less subject to distortion than most economic indicators.

[InitialLastName]

Then wouldn't you end up with a class of economists who are in a revolving door situation with financial institutions (who stand to benefit from networking with those controlling the purse strings), the same way we now have politicians converting to lobbyists (who benefit from networking with those controlling the political decision making)?

[Godel_unicode]

The bad guys in David Weber's Honor Harrington novels are based on this idea. It's an interesting take on what might happen.

[dragonwriter]

> The bad guys in David Weber's Honor Harrington novels are based on this idea.

Pedantically, the obvious “bad guys” in the earliest few, not the (so far, at least) principal bad guys of the whole series, who it turns out were also manipulating those obvious, early ones.

> It's an interesting take on what might happen.

It's kind of a shallow throwaway regurgitation of a standard argument without deep exploration or novel insight (which is okay, because it's not like Havenite society under the People's Republic is all that central a focus of any of the books, so shallow cartoonish broad strokes are fine.)

[astrange]

The bad guys in Baen published novels are just whoever the author doesn't like, usually anyone who isn't a Republican.

Though David Weber has his own pro-monarchy pro-libertarian ironically-not-racist thing going on, he just assigns random evil acts to random characters coincidentally named after his opponents, like having the Progressive Party actually be into human trafficking.

(When SF authors get old they all develop terrible opinions a while before anyone notices. Like Larry Niven wrote a book about the Green Party causing an ice age by stopping climate change and Arthur C Clarke became a pedophile. Heinlein, of course, started out that way.)

[dragonwriter]

> like having the Progressive Party actually be into human trafficking.

IIRC, the Party, per se, wasn't, though a leader of that party was an agent of an organization that was.

[cryoshon]

the exact scenario that you described plays out in Argentina among other places.

in the US, it would look a bit different, though.

neither party is clean, and so both agree to leave questions of cleanliness off the table.

[oh_sigh]

People don't necessarily want hand outs, they perhaps just want to live in an environment where they can sustain themselves through their own effort. Perhaps this is part of the reason HRC lost in November.

[astrange]

Centrists like HRC don't believe in giving you things for free, they want to watch you jump through hoops made of paperwork first. It's the TurboTax lobby at work.

[astrodust]

Instead of spending trillions bombing other countries, why not bomb the US? Think of the jobs created by rebuilding entire cities from rubble!

[qbrass]

Just antagonize some other country into to using their bombs and save even more.

[devoply]

What sort of corruption is possible when everything is done by machines. The greatest argument to privatized enterprise is efficiency, but how does that argument hold up with factories that are massively automated. Why are owners of such an enterprise needed at all?

If everything is automated then such companies need no owner as the ownership is to make sure the work gets done properly. It will be done properly no matter what the owners do. Why are they entitled to anything more than your average person.

I would think in the future you have shareholders, people who own the machines, that employ like a few workers who are managed by machines. And therefore those shareholders can just be just about anybody or even governments... who take the profit or revenue that enterprise generates and distribute it to the people.

I am talking about something like this sort of business which does not change, or grow much. It's a commodity. It can just be produced by pretty much anyone.

[philipkglass]

If we reach that point I would prefer to see people vote for government to construct new automated production facilities and provide their benefits to the people. Rather like how I think that voters should be able to vote for a government owned power plant, sewage treatment plant, library, broadband provider, etc. but I don't think they should be able to vote to seize the nearest privately owned book store for conversion to a public library.

If you build public facilities in parallel there's no unjust seizure of existing assets. (Some people will complain that it's unfair to allow the government to do anything at all that could reduce the profitability of existing private assets, but I don't think that those people make up a prohibitive share of the population.)

[devoply]

With the amount of unused capital that is available in the system these days... I don't know why anyone would, anyone should be able to buy machines and build their own factory. It's just that those assets would not be growth assets. In fact if anything I would think investors would not be interested in investing in that sort of enterprise... as the returns are nominal so it makes sense for governments to run these sorts of things like utilities.

[samstave]

Wouldn't such a society be predicated on the idea that everyone has a basic income - and these fully automated factories with no (state?) ownership would be relegated to producing the basic consumables that come along with a society that provides all the basics for survival and hygiene and ideally health (mental and physical)

As such, a society would find value in the skills of the populous which produce things that have a "human" value for having been created by a human.

Further, it would seem that the overall population would drop significantly. Especially as technology for automation iterates, machines will care for human basic needs, and will care for maintenance and production of other machines to keep the system going.

Will AI manage the overall resource supply chain?

It would be interesting to see a critically thought out matrix of all the roles which could be done by machine/automation/AI vs that which must require a human.

What about "soft" skills required to run a civilization; politics and law for example.

Where politics is fundamentally required to ensure stability of an economy and society such that humans can survive in an ordered world, it is clearly exploitable and shouldn't we be attempting to remove as much human cruft from that process as possible - but ensuring that human empathy remains. As machines cannot have empathy. (At what point do we trust "programmed empathy" in AI?)

---

While there are all these efforts on ML to get machines to "see", say, cats in a picture, are there any efforts for teaching an AI to discern emotion in any given scenario?

Then ultimately, an AI will use all this to interpret intent...

[someSven]

Civilized societys resepect property. They are entitled to it, because it's theirs.

Besides, who would invest in a country where people have such a mindset? And what is with companies owned by local and international shareholders?