[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-...,