[serpix]

just think about it. Factories produce with near zero human muscle costs endless supplies of goods that take care of all our vital needs. With a tiny little effort we could almost entirely automate food production. The way it is currently set up is because of the invention of money and ownership we are in a false sense of lacking something. We lack nothing anymore. In reality there is no lack, hasn't been since the invention of factories and farm machines.

Alan Watts predicted our overabundance of goods in the sixties and the problems we will face (and are facing).

https://bigthink.com/technology-innovation/alan-watts-basic-...

The bottom line is:

who should pay for the basic income?

machines. they do it already.

[vinceguidry]

Properly allocating all resources that humans produce on the scales larger than tribes is only really doable by markets. Ensuring universal access to a subset of those resources is only doable through government programs. Funding government programs is only really doable through taxation. So we're back where we started. You must tax the market to pay for the capacity to universally allocate some of the resources.

You can't tax a machine, you can only tax people, because people operate machines, they can't generate fungible resources (money) themselves. There will always be a market between resources and individuals.

[perl4ever]

"just think about it. Factories produce with near zero human muscle costs endless supplies of goods that take care of all our vital needs. With a tiny little effort we could almost entirely automate food production."

You're implying that costs are mostly physical effort and automation is a "tiny effort". That's a really weird thing to say on a forum called Hacker News, and why on earth do you think food production isn't "almost entirely automated"? Any prediction of a sudden change in the rate of a trend needs to explain why the change didn't happen more gradually and sooner, as soon as it was possible.