| > It reminds me of the endless ghettoes of William Gibson's Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, etc.) where people are basically warehoused and left to jack into "simstim" and rot. > In reality the pitchforks will come out as you say and this endless ghetto will be paired with a total surveillance police state to contain the angry aimless masses. Perhaps not coincidentally this is exactly what Silicon Valley seems to be building. Too true. But that was Gibson's way of showing the "bad result" of society. There's plenty of places where scifi authors use constructs of absolutism to show very bad places policies go. And if you think TV was the great pacifier, then just wait till VR and AR really take off. Live in a 15'x15' room and feels like a mansion. > I was briefly into the idea of basic income until I thought about it more deeply. It's basically consigning the bulk of humanity to the status of "surplus flesh." There's this idea that if you give everyone basic income they'll all turn into philosophers and artists and entrepreneurs, but it's not true. Humans are social beings. We are not going to become those things unless we are surrounded by other human beings who are those things and that only happens when we are surrounded by a lot of people who are doing things. That's not going to happen if there's nothing to do. No, basic income was a way to provide the basics of living plus a bit more, so everyone has the innate rights of: water, food, electricity, communication, lodging. To not have this covered for every human should be abhorrent. The converse to this is that some people just don't deserve food, or water, or shelter, or electricity, or communication. And especially with food/water/shelter, we see semi-significant efforts to try to stem those. Solving lack of food is solved by... providing food. Same with water, but thankfully we don't see coin-op water fountains. We do have homeless shelters, but many have barriers for the people to use. Drug usage is rampant along with mental illnesses. And many a time they have oppressive "closing hours" so homeless cannot simply take any job. A UBI would provide money in so that people could put it where they need it. Many a times, these are cashflow problems which can be solved by cash. > (List of many non-UBI things that can be done) Without the requisite resources for #1, it seems torturous to say you can lengthen life spans without the means to keep someone alive respectfully. This seems more like "Keep the rich living 2x-3x life span while the rest of us die in our 60's". The extermination of mental illness is something I would heartily support. The only problems with those are well cited - you need permission from the very people whom you want to treat. And many times, their illness has them not give permission. This has been well discussed in the homeless/jail/mental health discussions on many places, including HN and Reddit. But I believe that you have posted UBI as a "UBI -or- Multipoint plan". I disagree with the postulate of "A or B". Both can be done. With people freed from the monotony of tiring drugde-work, people could start working on the very societal things you mention. Not everyone will, of course. But that's the nature of freedom: people can and should be able to choose their destiny. Right now, that's bound by threat of hunger, lack of shelter, being divorced from social net, and poverty. |