[janandonly]

Utopia: “free” money for everybody. In the form of a Basic Income.

Dystopia: controls on how we spend our money. No matter if we earned it ourselves or were gifted the money. No buying or selling without it being whitelisted. Maybe in the form of CBDC’s?

Utopia: no more spamming because no one can me anonymous.

Dystopia: every service, platform and protocol will need KYC options.

[rapnie]

I feel many utopic visions being sold are also propagated by those involved in trends that move towards dystopia. Like Microfinancing can be used to allow poor people to finally be able to make investments that were out of reach for them before. But also in practice often abused by loan sharks to bring these people in eternal debt. For UBI I wonder if it will also be a tool to keep people content and happy (frogs in boiling water) while the rise of AI in the hands of big corporations causes the bottom of the labour market to fall out for a large part of office workers.

[worldsayshi]

While there's increasingly good reasons to introduce basic income there seems to be little substantial movement in that direction.

I have a feeling that the reasonableness of basic income will grow at about the same pace as the power of workers will diminish. Not sure if there's a way to change that equation?

Introducing a very small basic income that is planned to grow might be a good way to go about this.

[mhuffman]

I believe that after enough automation, UBI (or at least BI) will have to manifest in "first-world" countries. Starvation will be the alternative. I also believe that when the sample size get big enough, there will be people that just live off of the UBI and do nothing else, and those will be easy to find and easy to politicize. So that the overbearing control of how people spend the money will come into play. You already see this with EBT.

There have not been many large-scale/long-run UBI pilot projects so there is not a lot of real evidence on what will happen. The Canadian experiment (mincome) from around 50 years ago is the main one that people reference and it has plenty of problems regarding scientific rigor and design. There are many other shorter and smaller ones from all over the world and different places within the US with mixed results. Many of them, if you look into them, have the problem where the politics of it will often conflict with (and usually overcome) any scientific rigor.

There are also many UBI alternatives, not just the "send everyone a check every month" varieties. Nearly all of them have some common sense reasonableness to them, but it is very, very expensive to really try and very hard to justify to many people to "just give" their tax money to other people for free without any qualifications.

[deadlast2]

Sort of feel that this is already done on the reservations in Canada. I don't think it works well.

[gremlinsinc]

I'm of the mindset and have been for awhile that the FASTER we crash, as a society --- the faster we hit rock bottom with ai taking jobs, and opportunity loss skyrocketing, the faster we get to the inflection point. Call it futuristic acceleration-ism or something akin to that, but I also feel like as bad as Trump was we needed him and his ilk to show how corrupt the govt is and can go.

He was in many ways a 'good' thing for America, by exposing the worst of America. A litmus test, or a penetration test, or something of American democracy if you will?

In the same way AI hastening up automation and job take-over will usher in UBI and post-scarcity faster than just relying on politicians to organically get there over a few decades.

[ben_w]

> He was in many ways a 'good' thing for America, by exposing the worst of America.

I remember reading that the Democrats were really pleased the Republicans chose him, because s/the worst of America/The Republican Party/g, and were shocked that he was popular.

[beepbooptheory]

Do you really think the concept of money itself is compatible with a utopia, even "free"?