[jjaredsimpson]

Criticism of the -- what I believe to be -- inevitable post-work post-scarcity economy is rooted in the false idea that employment provides meaning to those employed.

But proclaiming the "Value of Work" is just arguing for the "Merits of Drudgery."

I can't wait to not work ever again. The weak reply that, "doctors have valuable employment that gives them meaning," is completely beside the point. Doctors like helping people or the challenge of solving an ailment or they like the high status of being a doctor in society or the high pay.

But they don't like paperwork, or interacting with insurance companies. Most work is like that. Low status, repetitive, boring, meaningless. Trading the best hours of the day of the best years of your youth is a terrible bargain, but persists because it is connected to survival and status.

Break the connection and humanity prospers.

[topmonk]

When I think about UBI, I keep picturing a group of pidgeons fighting over pieces of bread.

I don't see UBI as freedom. It shares a lot with slavery, in that someone else is feeding you, and therefore has control over you.

What I hope for in the future is a fully independent machine that each person owns and is capable of caring for them, by providing food, shelter, etc. and is capable of building a clone of itself.

In this way, you truly are free, having a machine which you own, and can shutdown and leave at anytime if you wish.

[ThomPete]

You are looking at this from the wrong perspective.

You are assuming there is someone (other humans) who are feeding you.

The point of UBI is that it's built on a realization that technology itself is feeding you. In the end, there isn't going to be any single owners because everything is better solved by the technology we are all going to be owning the means of production so to speak.

The post-scarcity society is where all basic needs are met.

If each person has their own machine you are kind of back to the same problem you have now. Who gets to use what resources?

[LrnByTeach]

Wow!!! one of the best explanations Type 1 Civilization (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale ) where technological advances results in "The post-scarcity society is where all basic needs are met"

and UBI is one form of Manifestation of 'Type 1 Civilization

> The post-scarcity society is where all basic needs are met.

> The point of UBI is that it's built on a realization that technology itself is feeding you.

> If each person has their own machine you are kind of back to the same problem you have now. Who gets to use what resources?

[bluesnowmonkey]

Why should technology continue to feed you though? Maybe it's more efficient to let you starve. This isn't a theoretical, what-would-a-currently-uninvented-AI-decide-to-do kind of question. Just look at what corporations do now. It's all about dollars and cents. Non-human entities don't care about what's right for humans. Even ones that are mostly composed of humans.

[ThomPete]

Oh you are right this is a potential risk and I don't see it as theoretical.

In my mind evolution favors the best information carriers and technology seems to be a better information carrier than humans. Also when it comes to going into space.

One argument for why technology would feed us is that until it's self-aware it needs us to be aware for it.

But I am fully with you on the non-certainty here. The premise is that humans are still around and thus needs UBI.

[cinquemb]

>Why should technology continue to feed you though?

I think this comes from current thinking based on past history where we were more resource constrained, embodied by this:

"In the rest of society, however, we often both try to hire people who seem to show off the highest related abilities, and we let those most prestigious people have a lot of discretion in how the job is structured. For example, we let the most prestigious doctors tell us how medicine should be run, the most prestigious lawyers tells us how law should be run, the most prestigious finance professionals tell us how the financial system should work, and the most prestigious academics tell us how to run schools and research."[0]

Where as a more technological perspective might recognize how thinking purely along the current "dollars and cents" prestige lines, and might come to realize that by seeking to sustain every human to some increasing degree, will then "free" the marginal human to help maximize along some dimension that isn't necessarily the "dollar and cents" direction (think for every high/college/grad school drop out now making ~6 figures writing software, that could be if afforded a similar style of living/degree of autonomy in life as they do today, might choose to pursue something more likely to enhance technological development[well who knows, maybe I am just speaking for myself], or those who were born into a situation where everyday was a arduous to feed themselves who then will be "free" to spend more of this time to anything but relative foraging for sustinence). This can perhaps be embodied as a solution by recognizing this:

"This can go very wrong! Imagine that we wanted research progress, and that we let the most prestigious researchers pick research topics and methods. To show off their abilities, they may pick topics and methods that most reduce the noise in estimating abilities. For example, they may pick mathematical methods, and topics that are well suited to such methods. And many of them may crowd around the same few topics, like runners at a race. These choices would succeed in helping the most able researchers to show that they are in fact the most able. But the actual research that results might not be very useful at producing research progress."[0]

[0] http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/06/beware-prestige-based-...

[fragmede]

Lacking UBI, scientists are forced to pick research topics that are only barely related because that's where the money is. (Eg grant proposals for million-nanometer sized machines when nano-machines were a hot research subject). How is letting scientists research subjects they're actually interested in, instead of seeking funding from industry any worse for the progress of science? Science research frequently has zero commercial application. (Eg Chemical compounds that could help humanity go unresearched because they can no longer be patented.)

[cinquemb]

>How is letting scientists research subjects they're actually interested in, instead of seeking funding from industry any worse for the progress of science? Science research frequently has zero commercial application.

Let's ignore any influence industry already may exert on any grant funding.

Because in some fields, at best, industry is behind what's being worked on in academia. In the mid 60's when arpanet was being developed, I wonder what the industry/market would have been asking for instead? Probably some minor extension of something they already seen before…

Being beholden to industry can be a blessing for some (just like the grant hamster wheel is for others), but for others it could just be another set of relatively arbitrary constraints in the scheme of figuring out the theoretical.

Here's a list of research in mathematics that in some shape or form, was considered to have zero commercial application[0]. Im sure you can find analogues in many sectors.

[0] https://mathoverflow.net/questions/116627/useless-math-that-...,

[eli_gottlieb]

>I don't see UBI as freedom. It shares a lot with slavery, in that someone else is feeding you, and therefore has control over you.

Right now, the labor market is feeding you, and very directly has control over you. You don't pick out where you think you can make the greatest contributions to humanity, you pick the job field that lets you make rent/mortgage each month.

Mind, I'm all in favor of fully automated luxury space homesteading, but a UBI or something like it will probably be an inevitable part of how we "convince" the economy to switch models from centralized infrastructure with competing workers to decentralized infrastructure with independent, mostly self-sufficient families and communities.

[ThomPete]

It goes further than that.

More or less any job a human can do, technology will do better. If not today then soon. And so even if we purely took a market point of view it's pretty obvious that humans and work isn't really an optimal cocktail once there is a technological alternative.